


Auto da Fae

by SylvanWitch



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-24
Updated: 2016-11-24
Packaged: 2018-09-01 23:25:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 63,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8642341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: When young Musketeer-in-training d'Artagnan is sent with Athos to Castelmore at the behest of its Comte to find Castelmore's lost son, Athos expects to discover some secrets of d'Artagnan's youth. What he does not expect is to fall through a portal into the fairy realm, where d'Artagnan is not a minor nobleman but a prince of the blood and where everything Athos understood about brotherhood, loyalty, and love is challenged. As Porthos and Aramis fight their way through the realms of the other world to rescue their brothers-in-arms, they, too, come to a new understanding of their relationships with each other, their fellow Musketeers, and the world they've left behind. (A Season One AU slash fairy fic.)





	1. Have a Little Fae

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Musketeers Big Bang 2016 challenge on LiveJournal and would not be nearly so polished without the patient help and keen editing eye of chemm80--thank you, babe! All remaining mistakes are my own.
> 
> The title is a play on the phrase auto-da-fe, or the "act of faith" inflicted upon "penitents" (read: those about to be executed, most commonly by burning at the stake) accused of heresy during the Inquisition.

Captain Treville of the King’s Musketeers wore a pained expression, as if his smalls were riding up, when Athos entered his office.

“You wanted to see me, Captain?”

Athos’ voice was carefully neutral. There had been recent tension between the Musketeers and the Red Guard, nothing out of the ordinary to Athos’ way of thinking, but Treville had been snappish and remote for the last few days. Something was amiss.

“How’s our prospect?” the captain asked without preamble.

Athos ignored the stab of alarm that shot through his belly, but he spared a quick moment to consider d’Artagnan’s behavior over the last month—nothing out of the ordinary, certainly nothing to put that expression on his captain’s face.

“He’s coming along,” Athos answered.

Treville’s chuckle was the dry creaking of untreated leather. “Save the politics for the Cardinal. Just tell me—is the boy ready for a...sensitive mission?”

Athos caught his captain’s minute pause, and he felt unease stir in his gut. Visions of d’Artagnan doused in eau d’toilette and shoved at some vapid, well-married minor noblewoman flashed through his mind. He shook them off. That was ridiculous and also unfair to Treville, who had never stooped to pandering before and certainly wouldn’t start now.

“d’Artagnan is proficient in hand-to-hand, though Porthos might tell you differently, and, as I’m sure you’ve observed, he’s excellent with a blade. His horsemanship is eccentric, but he can sit anything. However, at court intrigue he would be,” Athos paused, a tiny quirk of his lip indicating his amusement at the thought, “an abysmal failure. It would be like setting a lion loose in a ladies’ sewing circle—some screaming, some blood, and many ruined dresses.”

Treville’s rusty laugh was less strained this time, and he gave Athos a wry, appreciative nod.

“Fortunately, I need him for less delicate diplomacy.”

Athos waited, knowing his captain would come to the crux of the matter in his own time.

“Near Castelmore, there is a band of gypsies with whom the Comtes de Castelmore have, for generations, had an agreement. The gypsies arrive on Our Lady’s Day and depart three days after midsummer. In exchange for use of the Comte’s land, they clear new fields, turn old ones, mend fences, that sort of thing. Until now, the Comte claims they have never had any trouble with the gypsies. In fact, the townsfolk look forward to the annual pilgrimage.”

Athos raised an incredulous eyebrow, and Treville nodded in acknowledgement.

"It seemed unlikely to me, as well, but the Comte claims that the gypsies bring music and laughter with them when they arrive, lifting the spirits of everyone they meet—”

“And never offend the sensibilities of a single village elder?”

Treville shrugged. “Apparently not. Not a single father has ever complained of his daughter being stolen away. Not one dame has ever complained of missing hens or pies or linens off the line. These gypsies are, it would seem, the perfect neighbors.”

Athos shook his head. In his experience, the Rom were honest, hard-working, and insular. Misunderstood by many and reviled by most, they preferred isolation to the inevitable contretemps that arose when they tried to establish a regular relationship with any particular village or holding.

“So what has happened to change this improbable idyll?”

 “The Comte’s son, Jean-Marie, disappeared on Midsummer eve. He expressed his intention to attend the gypsies’ midsummer revels, to which he’d been expressly invited, but he failed to return the next morning. His father assumed Jean-Marie was sleeping off his excesses at the camp, but when he eventually sent his steward to retrieve his son, the steward found the entire camp empty, wiped clean of any sign that the gypsies had ever been there. The Comte leapt to the usual conclusion.”

Athos nodded grimly. Indeed, it sounded as though something had gone awry, though he was loth to conclude it was the fault of the Rom. Perhaps the boy had gotten drunk and fallen into a bonfire or stumbled off to piss and drowned in a pond or stream. Maybe he had choked on his own spew. Things happened when the nobly born were first let off their bejeweled leashes. He was living proof of it.

"And what does this have to do with d’Artagnan?” Athos asked at last, putting away his other misgivings for the one at the forefront of his mind.

Treville nodded as though he’d been expecting the question. “The Comte requested d’Artagnan specifically.”

Athos schooled his features to coolness, but Treville’s revelation was dumbfounding. Athos’ impression had been that the d’Artagnans were noble but poor—hardly the sort to rub elbows with a Comte.

“It seems Jean-Marie de Batz de Castelmore, the Comte’s son, and d’Artagnan were boyhood…friends.”

Athos didn’t miss the hesitation, minute though it was, and he found himself growing angry at his captain’s indirection. “How is it that d’Artagnan came to be acquainted with someone of Jean-Marie’s station?”

Treville shook his head. “I don’t know, and the Comte’s man made it clear that I shouldn’t ask. Besides, doesn’t d’Artagnan deserve his privacy? It is enough that a man of the Comte’s position and influence has requested our help; I see no harm in complying with his request.”

There was a brusque dismissal in his captain’s voice that alarmed Athos more than any amount of bluster or oily assurance would have. Treville was deeply uncomfortable with Castelmore’s request, but he wasn’t sharing his feelings with Athos, and it was clear that he wished Athos to take his sealed orders, balanced on the near edge of Treville’s desk, and depart.

"Sir—?” Athos began, feeling out of his depth and off kilter. But the question clogged his throat as he caught Captain Treville’s expression—for an unguarded moment he had looked ancient, his face drawn, eyes dull, the corners of his mouth turned down in deep unhappiness.

Foreboding gripped his innards in an icy fist, but he saved his question, stepped forward, and took the orders without another word.

As he emerged from Treville’s office into the diffuse light of the gallery, he caught sight of d’Artagnan sitting on one of the tables, his boots on the bench beside Porthos, who was leaning back on his elbows saying something to the younger man. Just then, d’Artagnan threw his head back to laugh, his eyes closing, teeth flashing, pure masculine sound echoing up from the yard.

Athos was struck, all at once and powerfully, by d’Artagnan’s openness, by the way he gave his whole body to laughter. His expression and posture suggested that he was here among trusted, even beloved, friends. He had come so far in the relatively short time he’d been among the Musketeers.

The urge to turn around and march back into his captain’s office, toss the orders back on his desk, and refuse to jeopardize d’Artagnan’s happiness froze Athos in place. He clenched his hands, crushing the orders in the process, and took a long breath, closing his eyes against d’Artagnan’s joy and reminding himself that such emotions were fleeting and treacherous. Far better for d’Artagnan to learn the sobering truth of human perfidy now than that he be betrayed to utter ruin later.

Besides, Athos had no proof that doom awaited the boy. And he had his orders, which were all that stood between Athos and his own annihilating knowledge of the truth of the world.

“d’Artagnan,” he barked from the gallery, watching as the young man’s face sobered, though hints of his humor lingered in his eyes and at the corner of his lips. “Pack your saddlebags. We’re going to Castelmore.”

*****

For the third time in as many hours, Athos recalled d’Artagnan’s attention to the road with a sharp repetition of his name.

d’Artagnan darted a guilty look at his companion and gave a rueful smile, a mere shadow of his earlier joie de vivre. Since Athos had told him why they were traveling to Castelmore, d’Artagnan had grown sober and increasingly distant, until they had arrived at this current state of awkward, tense disquiet.

“Sorry,” d’Artagnan said. “I must have been daydreaming…again.”

“By your expression, it can’t have been a good dream,” Athos remarked, trying to make his tone as light as his words. Given d’Artagnan’s answering wince, Athos had missed the mark.

Abandoning diplomacy—he’d always been better at action, at any rate—Athos came at the problem directly. “Do you know why the Comte de Castelmore asked for you specifically?”

d’Artagnan gave a sullen shrug, his expression turning mulish.

“Come now, I’m not asking you to reveal your darkest secrets—,” Athos began, but when d’Artagnan visibly startled and blanched, Athos realized his careless words had struck some tender point in the young man.

“What did Treville tell you?” d’Artagnan hissed, and Athos realized he had moved from sullen to desperate in the span of a few breaths.

Athos raised one gloved hand, palm up and fingers together, a gesture of placation. “He told me nothing other than that the Comte had requested your help in finding his son.”

Athos’ assurance did little to ease the tightness of d’Artagnan’s muscles. d’Artagnan’s usually unflappable steed bobbed his head and took a few mincing strides, his rider’s discomfort communicating itself to the horse.

“d’Artagnan,” Athos said quietly, halting his own horse. d’Artagnan followed suit a few steps ahead so that he had to turn in the saddle to look at Athos directly.

“Have I given you any reason to doubt my friendship?”

At the question, d’Artagnan ducked his head guiltily and shook it, no longer looking at Athos.

“Surely you must know that I would not pry into your private life if it were not that I am concerned for you and for this _mission_.” Athos emphasized the last word, making it clear that he was functioning as both friend and Musketeer. Indeed, he had been both together for so long with Aramis and Porthos that he forgot what it was like for others. Perhaps for d’Artagnan, their mutual pledge was not enough to assure him of their absolute loyalty to one another.

Athos watched d’Artagnan’s silent struggle and saw the moment that the other came to a decision. d’Artagnan looked up, and it was again as though Athos were accompanied by a stranger. Whatever place or time d’Artagnan’s thoughts had taken him to had robbed him of his youthful vigor. It was a harder, older man who looked at Athos then.

“I can assure you that nothing that transpired between Jean-Marie and I can have any bearing on his disappearance, but I will tell you the story inasmuch as it is mine to tell. I wouldn’t have you doubting _my_ friendship.”

The bitter resignation in his tone alarmed Athos, and he realized that he had put d’Artagnan entirely on the defensive, an unintended side effect of his original question. He silently cursed his clumsiness and wished that Aramis were there to smooth the way between them with a wry remark.

“When I was fifteen, I was caught poaching by the Lady de Montesquiou’s gamekeeper. In fact, I had been invited to hunt her lands, as the Lady is my cousin, but Martin, her gamekeeper, took me for a peasant, and I was dragged to the stables for a summary whipping. It happened that the Comte de Castelmore and Jean-Marie were visiting my cousin and had only just arrived in the yard when I was brought in. The Comte, taking me for more than the peasant I appeared to be, halted the proceedings to interrogate me.

Once the Lady was summoned and recognized me, she apologized for forgetting to inform Martin of my intention to hunt there and invited me to share supper with her and her guests. During the meal, Jean-Marie hardly spoke and only rarely looked up from his plate. He seemed…thoroughly afraid of his father, a sentiment I came to understand only later. At any rate, the Comte decided there was something in me that Jean-Marie could stand to imitate, and he offered me work as a sort of tutor for his son.

He wanted me to teach him ‘the manly arts’.”

Athos could hear the Comte’s sneering superiority in the way d’Artagnan quoted him, and a frisson of profound unease slithered through him. He shifted in his saddle to hide his discomfort, and d’Artagnan nodded toward the road ahead.

“Shall we? I _can_ speak and ride at the same time.” There was the barest hint of d’Artagnan’s sly self in the remark, and Athos grasped at the suggestion with relief, moving his horse beside d’Artagnan’s and resuming his posture of attention.

As they rode southwest and the sun slid down the bowl of the sky in front of them, d’Artagnan related in barest detail the summer he had spent at Castelmore. Despite the lack of specifics, it was clear even to Athos’ stunted sense of romance that it had been a life-changing summer for d’Artagnan. Jean-Marie had blossomed under d’Artagnan’s steady, patient tutelage, learning to take risks and growing beyond the stifling expectations of his father. That the two boys had been close was obvious; that there was more to their relationship than the quick-growing brotherhood of shared experience was unclear, but Athos sensed a vast reservoir of memory over the top of which d’Artagnan only skimmed.

“On my sixteenth birthday—August ninth,” d’Artagnan supplied,—we snuck out of the house to go snipe-hunting.”

This startled a fond laugh out of Athos, who had forgotten until that moment about the rite of passage typical of boys of a certain age and station. He had initiated his brother, Thomas, into that particular tradition: Staying out in the woods all night, searching for an elusive creature that neither of them truly believed in, starting at every secret forest sound and sharing fortifying swallows of pilfered brandy. It was intended to build character and bond boys into a brotherhood of kept secrets, but in Athos’ experience it had mostly created a monstrous hangover.

d’Artagnan acknowledged Athos’ laugh with a smirk and a nod. “It wasn’t the sort of tradition I’d been raised with—we were a more conservative family—but I could see that Jean-Marie was excited to do it, so I went along with it. In the end, it wasn’t snipes we discovered.”

He drew up abruptly, stopping both words and horse, and turned away from Athos, who had reined in beside him. When he turned back moments later, there was a shadow around his eyes that pained Athos to see. It reminded him far too much of looking in a mirror.

“The rest of the night’s tale is not mine to tell. Suffice it to say that I was summarily dismissed, sent packing without being allowed to so much as bid farewell to Jean-Marie and warned that if I ever showed my face in Castelmore again, it would be more than a whipping that I earned for my impertinence.”

A breath shuddered out of him, audible even over evening birdsong and the swish of the horses’ tails.

“I haven’t seen Jean-Marie since. As far as I know, he never tried to write to me, either, though I suppose his father kept a close eye on him for a while after that and may have prevented him.” d’Artagnan shrugged, as though trying to settle a great weight more comfortably across his shoulders. “I sometimes wondered what had become of him, but I—.” And there he stopped, clearly unwilling to delve any more into the well of sorrow Athos had all unwittingly disturbed.

“I am sorry that this mission has already caused you pain,” Athos blurted, not giving himself time to think of a more politic sentiment. His voice wore the aspect of his thoughts, and d’Artagnan colored, face growing stony.

“I don’t need your pity,” he flung, pride clearly stung by Athos’ attempt at compassion.

God, how he missed Porthos just then, the big man’s rough humor and easy laugh having often soothed the sharp sting of misunderstanding. Even so, Athos didn’t appreciate d’Artagnan’s assumption.

“Don’t mistake kindness for pity, d’Artagnan. There’s little enough of either in the world.”

That abashed his companion, and Athos saw him swallow hard before tightening a hand on the reins.

“Shall we go on? We have light enough for another league or so.”

d’Artagnan bobbed his head in agreement, and they took to the road once more, now shrouded in a delicate silence that threatened to break the peace between them at every indrawn breath.

He had never been gladder to see the lights of an inn beckoning out of the looming darkness, giving them the excuse of a room full of suspicious strangers to remove some of the distance between them by the necessity of watching one another’s back.

 _One for all_ , Athos thought bitterly as he settled onto a louse-ridden straw mattress and waited for the dubious comfort of dream-riddled sleep. Beside him on another such mattress, d’Artagnan made not a sound, in his stillness seeming as though he were trying to disappear from the eyes of a dangerous predator.

 _What has life done to him?_ Athos wondered and then wished he hadn’t, knowing the thought would follow him down into his dreams.

*****

A journey that should have taken them four days had taken only three. After d’Artagnan had shared his story on their first day’s ride, Athos had hoped that the young man would trust him with more, that the shared ride would convince him that Athos could be trusted.

Instead, the inverse had occurred, d’Artagnan growing more tight-lipped as they drew ever closer to Castelmore, the darkness around his eyes more pronounced, until Athos finally forced him to stop and dismount less than a league or so from the village that bore the Comte’s name.

“We’re almost there,” d’Artagnan protested, but there was a strain in his voice that belied his words’ eagerness. Some titanic conflict was wrestling d’Artagnan apart, and Athos could see it scouring his face of color, his eyes of light.

“It would be wise for us to decide how we’re going to approach the Comte,” Athos said.

“ _He_ called upon _us_ ,” d’Artagnan answered, impatiently yanking off his gloves and straining at the leather tie that bound his water-skin to his saddle.

“That’s not precisely true,” Athos responded, regulating his tone. In fact, the Comte had asked for only one of them by name.

d’Artagnan cast him an accusing look, as though Athos had violated some agreement they had made not to further discuss his history with the Castelmores.

“I told you—I don’t know why the Comte requested my help.”

“You did tell me that,” Athos agreed, waiting.

D’Artagnan flushed and took a long drink, avoiding Athos’ steady gaze.

“Nothing that happened between me and Jean-Marie can have any relevance to his disappearance,” he protested after an awkward period of silence. “I haven’t seen him in years!” There was anguish in the confession, and something else, a darker sentiment—guilt, Athos thought, intimately familiar as he was with all of its ugly expressions.

“Something must have brought the Comte to believe you could help in finding his son,” Athos observed, still careful, still biding.

“No! There is noth—.”

It would have been comical, the way d’Artagnan’s eyes widened in sudden realization, the way he fumbled with the water-skin and almost dropped it, if it weren’t for how he also paled, burnished skin draining to clay in an instant. His hand came up to touch a place on his chest, as though it pained him, and he startled back when Athos reached out, alarmed, saying, “d’Artagnan?”

Then he straightened, took a deep breath, and squared his shoulders. His face slowly resumed its color as he regained his composure, and a long moment later, he cast Athos a weak smile.

“Forgive me. I think I had too much wine last night,” he demurred. As they had slept under the stars the night before and shared only the watered wine that Athos always kept in one skin, this was a lame diversion, at best.

Still, it was the sort of white lie a Musketeer might tell and expect his fellows to accept. _Porthos would be proud_ , thought Athos thought ruefully. d’Artagnan had learned more from the stoic Musketeer than how to subdue a larger opponent with his bare hands.

“We’ll rest a few minutes here in the shade, then,” Athos suggested, gesturing toward the umbrage of a stand of ancient oaks just to the west of the road.

If d’Artagnan’s face took on an expression of gratitude all out of proportion to Athos’ words, the latter had the grace to pretend he hadn’t noticed.

*****

Athos didn’t know what he’d expected of the Comte de Castelmore, but it wasn’t the thin, dried-up husk of a man who greeted them as they rode into the forecourt of the stately chateau from which the Comte had gotten his title. Everything about him was grey—his hair, his eyes, the skin of his face and neck. Even the understated elegant of his expensive coat could do nothing to improve his appearance.

 _He looks as though he’s been dried on a rack_ , _all the life leached out of him_ , Athos thought unkindly, dismounting and stepping between the Comte’s avid glare and d’Artagnan, who had made no move to approach their host when he himself had dismounted.

“I am Athos of the King’s Musketeers, at your service, Comte de Castelmore.” Athos swept his hat off and made the courtesy appropriate for a man of the Comte’s station.

He thought for a moment that the Comte was going to forego custom altogether, so focused was his gaze on d’Artagnan. However, the chateau’s steward, standing deferentially on the stone steps behind the Comte, cleared his throat rather pointedly, and the Comte returned Athos’ greeting with a distracted nod.

“Welcome to Castelmore, Athos. We appreciate the alacrity with which you and…your companion have arrived. We did not expect you until tomorrow, earliest.”

“Captain Treville impressed upon us the urgency of our mission,” Athos demurred, tacitly reminding the Comte that they were there on the King’s business and at the Comte’s request.

“Comte de Castelmore,” d’Artagnan said at last, stepping up beside Athos and offering a slightly less polished courtesy of his own.

This time, the Comte did not remember his manners, acknowledging d’Artagnan’s greeting with neither words nor gesture. The steward remained tellingly silent, too.

Out of the corner of his eye, Athos saw d’Artagnan’s features harden, saw the way his hand shook with some powerful emotion as he put his hat back on his head. The sound of his foot shifting in the gravel of the drive seemed to recall the Comte to his duties, and though he still did not acknowledge d’Artagnan, he did make appropriate noises about refreshing themselves after their long journey.

The steward, Beaumont, a squat, broad-shouldered man of indeterminate age, who made up for in unctuous deference to Athos what he utterly lacked in politeness to d’Artagnan, showed them to a suite of palatial rooms on the west wing of the house. There was cool water, delicately scented with lavender, waiting in a basin on a fine mahogany stand, and a sideboard with crystal decanters filled with what smelled to Athos, no inexperienced drinker, like an exceptionally fine assortment of liquors.

When he’d removed cloak and boots, brushed the dust from his trousers as best he could, and divested enough to put on a clean shirt from the bag that had been left on the floor by a blushing maid, Athos padded in stockinged feet to the door that led to d’Artagnan’s room.

It was partly ajar, and thoughtlessly, Athos began to open it further, distracted by the Comte’s behavior toward d’Artagnan and perhaps too accustomed to the life of a soldier’s camp to pay attention to the tacit contract a partly closed door was intended to convey between gentlemen.

When he caught sight of d’Artagnan standing at his basin, his back half-turned to the door, shirtless and dripping with water, the proper thing would have been to back quietly from the room and then knock to announce his presence.

Instead, Athos stood a breathless moment staring at his half-naked companion. About many things had Athos deluded himself in his lifetime: the character of his dead wife, his own capacity for cruelty, even, perhaps, his exact prowess with a blade. Never, however, had Athos indulged in hypocrisy when it came to his fleshly desires.

Indeed, having learned how deeply a woman could wound him, he’d largely preferred the occasional company of men in the years following his wife’s terrible betrayal. Men were simpler, he’d found: They wanted what he did, a pleasurable release in the company of another who didn’t much care for small talk or commitments, and they were bound to be discreet, if only for their own lives and reputations.

So Athos could admit to himself that he’d admired d’Artagnan’s beauty, his lithe grace, leonine profile, the breadth of his shoulders and how it accentuated his lean, tapered waist. He wasn’t blind, and he wasn’t dead.

However, having the occasional private moment of lust was not the same thing at all as leering at a brother-in-arms while he was unaware of Athos’ hungry gaze. It occurred to him that in the month since he’d known d’Artagnan, the other had never removed his shirt in front of Athos or, to his knowledge, any of them. He supposed it wasn’t that unusual, but surely, in all that time, there must have been an occasion…

Too late, Athos realized that d’Artagnan was turning and had caught sight of his voyeur. As if he were a blushing maiden and not a full-blooded man, d’Artagnan snatched at his travel-stained shirt and bunched it in front of his chest.

The damage had already been done, however: Athos had caught sight of what his companion was trying to hide.

“It’s a shame to hide a thing of such beauty,” Athos said, surprising himself with the words. He’d intended to stammer out some hasty apology and back from the room as quickly as he could without tripping over his own feet.

Instead, his eyes were snared on the tip of one bright wing, blushing sunset colors just apparent over the dirty fabric of d’Artagnan’s makeshift cover.

d’Artagnan seemed to come to a decision then, for he dropped the shirt on the floor at his—bare, Athos noted absently—feet and stood, hands at his sides, palms facing outward, a bold invitation for Athos to take his fill of looking.

Without conscious volition, Athos ventured further into the room, closer to d’Artagnan, who, Athos realized, was trembling, a faint, fine tremor across his skin that made it seem as though the butterfly painted on his left pectoral were actually alive, flexing its wings minutely before launching itself into glorious flight.

Again without thinking about it, Athos raised his hand, reaching toward the skin, wanting nothing more than to feel that trembling beneath his fingers, stroke the softness of the wings, rouse a reaction from the heart that surely pounded beneath the tattoo.

So fixated was Athos on his desire that he didn’t realize d’Artagnan had yet to speak, and only when a firm hand came up to wrap around his wrist and halt his progress did Athos recall himself.

Mortified, he wrenched away and turned as if to flee. But though over many things Athos had been a coward in his time, he was not so much one now that he couldn’t turn back to face his friend and brother-in-arms.

“I—,” Athos began, intending to apologize for his presumption.

“It’s not your fault,” d’Artagnan said at the same time, drawing Athos up short.

Athos gave him a look that indicated his confusion. How could it not be Athos’ fault that he was full of lust for his brother? Was he not responsible for his own desires?

“It happens sometimes. That’s why I keep it covered. The woman who gave it to me…she said that it was magic.” d’Artagnan looked at the floor between his feet, not into Athos’ eyes as he said this, and Athos felt his heart squeeze tight in his chest at how young and lost d’Artagnan looked as he confessed this intimacy of his past.

A thousand questions crowded Athos’ thoughts, some of them pertinent to the reason they were here in Castelmore, but the one that emerged was, “Who was she?” and he was ashamed at the way jealousy tightened his voice.

d’Artagnan looked up then, surprise on his face. He shrugged off the question, saying, “A woman I knew when I was younger,” and then, as if only just then realizing the motive behind Athos’ question, he added, “Not a lover,” hastily, almost abashed. “Just a friend.”

Athos nodded, finally getting to what he should have already said, “I’m sorry for intruding. I should have knocked. I—it was—.” ( _Now who was the blushing maiden?_ ) Athos tried again, “Thank you for sharing this with me. It’s a beautiful piece, truly.” With effort, he kept his eyes from straying back to the tattoo.

“I know it’s not the usual thing. That soldiers have, I mean,” d’Artagnan answered. Athos was absurdly grateful that d’Artagnan sounded as awkward as he himself felt.

“What matters is that you chose it,” Athos said then, feeling on firmer ground now that he was reassuring d’Artagnan. “And it suits you somehow.”

Athos thought d’Artagnan blushed then, but he had turned away to rummage a clean shirt from his saddlebags, and Athos couldn’t be sure.

Recalling his actual reason for coming to see d’Artagnan, Athos spent a few minutes assuring himself that d’Artagnan wasn’t going to launch himself across the supper table at the Comte. Not that d’Artagnan was incapable of self-control—a point d’Artagnan made rather heatedly when Athos hinted at his concern—but the Gascon was a rather excellent specimen of his whole breed—sometimes impulsive, often impetuous, quick-tempered, passionate, and fierce.

Athos caught his mind wandering and dragged it back to the point at hand.

“It is obvious that both you and the Comte have held a grudge. It is equally apparent that though the Comte called for _your_ help, specifically, he has not forgotten whatever it is that drove you and Jean-Marie apart to begin with. I’m asking not only as your friend, d’Artagnan, but as your commander in this instance: Can you keep your temper, no matter how outrageous the Comte’s behavior might become?”

Athos waited while d’Artagnan waged an internal war, eventually drawing himself to his full height and assuming a grave expression. “I promise you, Athos, on my father’s grave, that I will not dishonor you, the Musketeers, the King, nor myself.”

Athos thought it curious prioritizing, but he let it pass, merely nodding. “I accept your word as surety of your actions as a gentleman.”

Pride assuaged, d’Artagnan consented to follow Athos out of their suite and down the stairs, where another blushing maid led them to a small, obviously less formal, dining room. A table, laid out for three, awaited them, and the maid urged them to be seated despite their host’s conspicuous absence.

“M’lord will be with you shortly,” she stammered, backing out of the room on a series of athletic curtseys.

They sat for a few minutes staring up at the smoke-stained portraits looming over the table, saying nothing. Beside him, d’Artagnan fidgeted with the place settings, folding and unfolding his napkin until Athos reached out and touched his near wrist with his finger.

At that, d’Artagnan’s eyes darted to Athos, and he blushed, ducked his head, and muttered, “Sorry,” before clasping his hands in his lap.

Athos sighed privately in relief when a second door opened at last to admit the Comte, whose mouth was set so tightly Athos wondered if he could open it to eat.

They had risen, as was appropriate when one’s host entered the room, but once more the Comte looked only at Athos, ignoring d’Artagnan altogether.

The rudeness was beginning to chafe on Athos’ patience, and he had to remind himself of the advice he’d given to d’Artagnan only an hour before.

He glanced at the latter now and saw that d’Artagnan’s hands were clenched around the napkin in his lap, his knuckles white. In an attempt to ease the palpable tension in the room, Athos launched into a series of questions about the household, estate, and holdings guaranteed to keep conversation moving smoothly through the first three courses.

At the fourth course, discussion faltered when the Comte touched on what the estate was like at midsummer, and all at once the specter of his missing son took up all the space between the three men.

They ate the rest of the meal quickly and in silence, and when the Comte suggested that they retire to his study, Athos was almost absurdly grateful for the excuse to escape the dark dining room.

The study was, in fact, yet darker—heavy, smoke-blackened wood paneling; greasy yellow light that didn’t penetrate the low-ceilinged gloom; thick, mud-colored rug that muffled their footsteps. Altogether, Athos would have preferred to stay in the dining room with the dirty dishes.

Though he didn’t look at d’Artagnan even when handing him a glass of brandy, the Comte at last recognized his presence.

“As you know, my son is missing,” he began without further preamble. “Details of his disappearance have come to my attention that suggest that you, d’Artagnan, may know something of his whereabouts or how to find him.”

The Comte spoke d’Artagnan’s name, sans polite titles, like it tasted bad and he had to force it out as quickly as he could.

Athos turned to look at his companion. It was hard to tell in the indeterminate light, but he thought d’Artagnan might break the glass from the way he was clutching it in his hand.

“What reason do you have for believing d’Artagnan may have this special knowledge?” Athos asked, giving d’Artagnan time to breathe.

The Comte shook his head sharply: “My reasons are my own. And I trust the young man here would prefer I keep them to myself as well.”

There was no mistaking the ugly sneer in his voice, and Athos stiffened, offended on d’Artagnan’s behalf. The Comte’s intimation was clear, even if his words were oblique. Athos expected his friend to leap from his seat and demand satisfaction for the slight. Instead, he watched as d’Artagnan leaned slowly forward to place the brandy glass on the Comte’s desk, behind which the man was perched like a hunting heron, all beady eyes and hungry intent.

Then, d’Artagnan stood up, bowed perfunctorily to the Comte, and said, “If you’ll excuse me,” in a low voice, before turning and making his way to the door.

“Wait!” the Comte commanded, but it had no effect on d’Artagnan’s retreat.

“Please,” he added as d’Artagnan began to turn the handle on the door. “I have no one else to turn to. I know that you can help. _Please_. Jean-Marie is my only son. My only child.”

“Convenient for you to remember that now,” d’Artagnan answered, back still to the man, who had risen from his chair and was clutching the edge of his desk with skeletal fingers.

The Comte choked, as if he was trying to swallow the supreme disdain in d’Artagnan’s voice, and then slowly sat back down. He closed his eyes against some private anguish, and when he opened them, they were once again cool with calculation.

“Whatever I may think of your…friendship…with my son, I can admit that you had a great deal of influence over him, not always negative. If Jean-Marie has gone with these gypsies willingly, it is because of something he learned from you.”

The Comte’s voice trembled, probably with an effort to prevent himself from ruining the tenuous détente he seemed to have pleaded out of d’Artagnan. For his part, the latter was still standing at the door, but he had at last turned around. He faced the empty space between the Comte’s desk and Athos’ seat, and he looked at neither man.

Athos thought d’Artagnan was smiling bitterly, but he couldn’t be sure. He wished the Comte would bring more light—to the room, certainly, and to this situation.

“It would, perhaps, be helpful if you could begin from the beginning, Castelmore.” (Since the Comte had decided to forego politeness, Athos saw no reason to pretend he respected the man’s position.)

The Comte took a breath in through his nose and nodded, relaxing his hands on the edge of his desk and staring off into the middle distance, as though drawing a memory up from a deep well.

“Arrowman comes with his people once a year to a clearing a mile west of the chateau. It’s an agreement my grandfather made with Arrowman’s father, and as it is to our mutual benefit—the gypsies are hard workers, say what you will about them otherwise—I’ve never seen the need to change things.

“It used to be that Jean-Marie would have nothing to do with the gypsies. He was afraid of strangers when he was younger. But d’Artagnan here is very comfortable with their sort, aren’t you?”

There was no mistaking his derision, but d’Artagnan might have been stone for all he responded to the tone.

“The summer Jean-Marie turned sixteen, he and d’Artagnan spent many a night carousing with the gypsies. I took it at the time as a sign of his maturity—he was, at last, behaving like a young man should, sowing his wild oats, as it were.

“God, I was even _proud_ of him.”

The contempt in his voice was for himself now, and Athos watched as the long, narrow face twisted into a mask of self-scorn.

“I was the worst kind of fool, taken in by smooth words and a gentleman’s name.”

d’Artagnan at last reacted, though it was only to turn his eyes upon the Comte. They seemed to flash with angry fire in the low light of the room, and Athos wondered if he was spry enough to get in front of d’Artagnan should he launch himself at the Comte.

“That is a foolishness we both share,” d’Artagnan said distinctly, and the Comte stiffened and drew in a sharp breath.

“Perhaps it would be best if you gave us only the facts of the case,” Athos suggested smoothly, though there was a cold, heavy weight in his gut growing in size as he watched his friend struggle with being in the same room, breathing the same air as this man he so clearly despised.

“Of course,” the Comte answered tightly, seeming to recall the dignity of his station.

“Since his sixteenth summer, my son has spent a great deal of time with Arrowman’s band when they come to Castelmore. They arrive on Lady’s Day and depart three days after midsummer. It has been so since I can remember.”

Athos knew as much already, and it was clear that the Comte was editing for the benefit of his pride.

“What did Jean-Marie do while in the company of the gypsies?”

The Comte gave an elegant shrug and turned his hands up on the desk as if to say, _How am I to know?_

“Should we ask Beaumont instead?” d’Artagnan interjected, and the Comte started, eyes flying to d’Artagnan’s face, widening with anger or perhaps fear.

 _Ah, here’s something interesting_ , Athos thought.

“He is still your faithful spy and henchman, is he not?” d’Artagnan’s hands were clasped behind his back, one fist cradled in the other palm. Athos watched as his fingers flexed and closed, flexed and closed, as if d’Artagnan were coming to grips with some powerful emotion.

The Comte tried to bluff it out with a sneer, but he seemed to realize the futility of resistance and at last gave in with a graceless snort.

“You may as well have the whole of it at once. I’ll summon him.”

“No,” Athos interrupted. “I think it best we speak to him separately.”

The Comte’s eyes narrowed, and a nasty little smile curled the corner of his ascetic mouth.

“Very well.”

“Why don’t you finish telling us what you know?”

As it happened, beyond wild speculation, the Comte had nothing more to tell them that they hadn’t learned from Treville and their orders: The boy had gone to a midsummer revel at the gypsy camp, and when he didn’t return home the following day, Beaumont was sent to fetch him. The steward found the gypsy camp wiped clean.

“I assume the gypsies took my son. Or that he went willingly. There was a reason you and he found them so…attractive…after all.”

d’Artagnan said nothing, but Athos saw his hand open and close once again. He had to admit, if only to himself, that he’d never recognized before that d’Artagnan possessed such reserves of self-control. There had been times during the Comte’s recitation when Athos himself had wanted to drag him over his desk and throttle the condescension from his throat.

Athos decided discretion in this case was the better part of valor and rose, joining d’Artagnan near the door. “We’ll speak with Beaumont tonight and ride out to the gypsy camp first thing in the morning.”

The Comte made a hand gesture as if to say, _Do what you will_.

With only the curtest of nods, Athos turned to the door, opened it, ushered d’Artagnan through, and then followed his young companion back up the stairs to their suite.

d’Artagnan wasted no time making for the sideboard, where he poured himself a tall glass of some clear liquor and threw it back in one long, smooth swallow. Athos most certainly did not watch his throat as he did so, nor did he admire the cording in his neck nor the bunching of muscle at his jaw that indicated his distress.

Athos drew in a breath to speak, hating to interrogate d’Artagnan further but knowing that he must, but d’Artagnan beat him to it.

“Drink?” he offered, lopsided grin indicating that he recognized his rudeness in going ahead without first offering Athos one.

“No, thank you,” Athos declined, moving to the broad clothes chest at the end of his bed and sitting there, leaving for d’Artagnan a plush chair upholstered in some dark material.

d’Artagnan chose instead to lean against the bed post nearest Athos, so that they were side by side instead of facing one another. Athos admired the maneuver. It was just the sort of thing he’d have done.

d’Artagnan’s relaxed posture was belied by his crossed arms and the tension in his back and shoulders. Athos wanted to reassure the young man that anything he revealed would be kept in strictest confidence between them and that nothing d’Artagnan might tell him could change their friendship.

Athos knew that neither of those things was true, however: His first duty was to the mission, and if Treville demanded answers, Athos would give them. As for the second meaningless reassurance—well, that largely depended on what d’Artagnan would say. While Athos couldn’t imagine he’d ever revile or reject d’Artagnan, he was a man of the world; there were some things it was better to keep secret.

d’Artagnan dropped his head, as if the weight of the words he was about to loose onto the world was too much for him. Then he raised his eyes again, fixed them on the far side of the room, and began in a wooden voice:

“I think you’ve probably figured out that Jean-Marie and I were…together. It wasn’t— We didn’t— I can’t talk about— _that_ —part of it with you. It’s private. It belongs only to the two of us. But there are things you need to know that might help us find out what happened to Jean-Marie, and I think you should hear them before we speak to Beaumont.”

d’Artagnan pronounced the steward’s name like a death sentence: hollow, foreboding, and final.

“I told you I was sent here to teach Jean-Marie how to be a ‘man,’ which to the Comte meant hunting, drinking, wenching—the usual aristocratic pursuits. He said, ‘I’m in charge of teaching him the business of being a Comte. Your job is to teach him the pleasures of being a man.’”

d’Artagnan made an awful noise, mirthless humor hawked from the back of his throat.

“I did teach him to hunt, though Jean-Marie hated the killing part. He liked the woods. He was interested in plants, knew all of their names and uses, which ones were medicinal and which could kill a man if dried and mixed into his tea. We’d spend whole days, sunrise to sunset, out in the forest gathering samples, eating whatever fresh game I could catch for us. I’d always save a brace of conies or quail for him to bring back to his father as proof that he was learning the manly arts.”

Another sound. Athos did d’Artagnan the honor of looking straight ahead, though he wanted, more than anything, to reach out and touch his hand or his arm, to tell him that he didn’t have to go on. With every word, his friend’s voice grew quieter, more strained, until Athos was forced to slide closer on the chest if only to hear him.

“We started visiting the gypsies for their plant lore. Ramilda—Arrowman’s woman, the one who gave me the tattoo—she knew all about plants and animals and all earthy things. She was sharp-tongued but tolerant—she knew about us before we did, I think. She’d invite us to camp in the evenings to listen to their stories and music, to learn their dances and drink their elderberry wine.

That’s how we first came to see, to understand that—.”

Athos couldn’t take the tension in d’Artagnan’s voice, and he at last did reach out, resting his fingers against d’Artagnan’s wrist, feeling the young man’s pulse leap wildly beneath his touch.

“It’s alright, d’Artagnan. I understand.” He tried to inflect his whole meaning into those last two words, to let d’Artagnan know that Athos himself enjoyed the company of other men. By the way d’Artagnan startled beneath his hand and pushed away from him, stalking across the room to round on him and glare, Athos thought perhaps he’d failed to convey what he’d intended to.

“Of all the reactions I imagined you having when— _if_ —I finally got the courage up to tell you this about myself, cruel mockery never entered my mind. You of all people—!” d’Artagnan caught himself, and a stricken look crossed his face before being replaced by stubborn sullenness.

Athos was drowning in the wake of d’Artagnan’s anger, at a loss to know what he’d done wrong. He sighed, closing his eyes for a moment, and then opened them again: “Do you think so little of me, that you believe I would mock you at such a time?”

He stood and closed some of the distance between them, heedless of d’Artagnan’s posture, which suggested he was going to strike first and ask questions much, much later.

“As for what sort of person I am, I can only say that I am your true friend, d’Artagnan, and that should be reason enough to believe me. Beyond that, I should note that deriding you for your…proclivities…would be the height of hypocrisy.”

d’Artagnan took in an audible breath and his eyes widened a fraction as he at last caught Athos’ meaning. The pulse at his throat jumped visibly, and his hands, clenched into fists only moments before, relaxed into a helpless, beseeching gesture.

“You?”

“Yes,” Athos affirmed simply.

d’Artagnan closed his eyes on some enormous emotion.

“Whatever has happened here, d’Artagnan, we’ll discover the truth together. You need not fear that I’ll judge you, and I will always stand by you—or at your back, if it comes to that.”

d’Artagnan took a long span of breaths to come to his decision, but at last he seemed to find some peace, for he returned to the chest upon which Athos had been sitting, sat down himself, and gave Athos an inviting look. When they were settled side by side, shoulders nearly touching on the now too-small chest, d’Artagnan continued with his story.

In many ways, it was like one of the romances Aramis was so fond of expounding upon when he was deep in his cups and feeling melancholy over some sleight of the heart. Star-crossed by station and inclination, the two boys had snatched at every chance to explore their mutual feelings, spending long days wandering the forest and longer nights by gypsy bonfires, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, exchanging furtive—and then bolder—touches by the dancing orange light. They drank, and held hands, and heard stories of great, world-defying love, and, as any young people would, came to believe that theirs was the greatest love story of their own or any age.

Inevitably, as most of the great love stories did, it was bound to come to a terrible end.

“It was my sixteenth birthday, as I’ve told you before. We used the excuse of the snipe-hunt to spend the night alone in the woods together. The gypsies were kind, but they liked to tease, and we didn’t want them to know—that is, we wanted our privacy. It was to have been our—.”

He caught himself on the cusp of an intimate revelation and shook his head, as if in mute denial of the memory. His tone after that was curt, words strangled to bursts of breath, as if he were running a terrible gauntlet.

“We were caught. It was Beaumont. He’d been spying on us for weeks. He—.”

This time, d’Artagnan couldn’t bring himself to go on. He sat beside Athos, nearly touching, his shoulders heaving with the pain of memory, face in his hands as though to hide himself from Athos’ sight.

Athos risked a touch, laying his hand, firm but gentle, at the nape of d’Artagnan’s bowed neck. d’Artagnan took in a great, shuddering breath and dropped his hands, turning to look at Athos for the first time since he’d begun his awful recounting.

“I can’t tell you that,” he whispered. “That part’s not mine to tell. And the rest you already know.”

Athos squeezed once, wanting to assure d’Artagnan that he was with him, that he wasn’t going to flee from d’Artagnan’s confession, and let go.

d’Artagnan gathered himself with a visible effort. “If it is as the Comte says and Jean-Marie has been spending time each summer with Arrowman and Ramilda and the others, I can’t imagine why they’d suddenly whisk him away. If he went with the gypsies, he must have gone willingly, unless something has radically changed in their relations. Or…” He trailed off, not wanting to voice what they were both thinking.

Athos did it for them. “Or there was an accident.”

d’Artagnan nodded.

“Was Jean-Marie much of a drinker? Could he hold his drink?”

d’Artagnan gave a weak, fond laugh. “No. He was a terrible drunk. Two mugs of wine and he was singing bawdy songs he’d learned from the coachman.”

“So perhaps that changed?”

“What hasn’t?” d’Artagnan answered, giving a sad shrug.

“We’ll find him, d’Artagnan, or, if we do not, we’ll discover what has happened to him.”

d’Artagnan nodded. “I know, Athos. If anyone can, it will be you. I’m glad you’re here with me. I don’t think I could do this alone.”

Athos scoffed. “Of course you could. You, my brave Gascon, can do anything you set your stubborn mind to.”

This raised a genuine, if watery, smile from the other man.

“Let’s go to bed, shall we?” Athos said lightly and then cursed himself when he realized how his innocent question might be taken.

And, indeed, d’Artagnan gave him a speculative look, not the expression of a boy to a man or a probationer to his commander but the way one man looks at another when he is considering taking him to bed.

Athos shook his head and let a rueful grin curl the corners of his mouth. “That did not come out as I intended it should.”

d’Artagnan laughed, a wicked light in his eyes that made Athos wish he _had_ meant to proposition the other. “I know what you meant.” But there was a warmth in his eyes that gave lie to his words, and Athos felt heat stirring low in his belly.

He stood up and made an exaggerated, sweeping gesture of invitation towards the door to the adjoining room. With a wry smirk, d’Artagnan rose, bowed in an equally ridiculous fashion, and left the room without another word or even so much as a backward glance.

Athos found himself breathing out a long, shaky exhalation of relief as the door between them closed. What he wanted and what he should have were often two very different things, and if life had taught him nothing else it was that one should learn to curb one’s impulses or the world would do it for him—brutally and with a twisted irony that defied faith or reason.

As he stripped to his smalls and splashed his face with tepid water, Athos wondered if he’d get any sleep. He resigned himself to tossing and turning, slid beneath the covers of his bed, and blew out the last candle, hoping that the dark, at least, would embrace him.

*****

In the night, d’Artagnan came to him.

The first he knew of his night visitor was the sensation of weight against his thighs, his shirt being rucked up, and then warm lips suckling at his nipples. It pressed the breath out of him in a heaving gust, and he raised his head to look down on d’Artagnan’s dark hair, which he could also feel trailing against the sensitive skin of his inner arms. He reached up to bury his fingers in the lushness of it, an act he’d imagined often, but d’Artagnan chose that moment to push himself up, strong arms bracketing Athos.

His eyes were drawn to the butterfly, pulsing in time to d’Artagnan’s heartbeat, and just as his fingers reached out to touch that softness, the wings flexed and the butterfly blossomed from d’Artagnan’s chest, taking flight, its delicate wings ghosting over his lips in mockery of the kiss he so longed to ask for. The air was filled with the scent of a summer meadow, flowers and sweetgrass and nectar.

He looked back at d’Artagnan, lips parted in delight, about to ask him for that kiss.

But where the tattoo had been, there was now a raw, red wound slowly filling with blood. Athos looked up into d’Artagnan’s face and saw his eyes lose their luster, his cheeks their blush, watched as his arms lost their strength and he began to sag towards Athos with a final, rattling sigh.

Athos reached up to brace d’Artagnan or to hold him, and his arms went right through, as though d’Artagnan were made of wet paper.

Aghast, he cried out, waking to streaming sweat and a lingering smell of sun-warmed meadows. He rolled to the edge of the bed and retched a thin stream of bile, the bitterness in his throat an echo of the painful constriction in his heart.

He heard, “Athos?” from the far side of the room and squinted through the darkness to make out the shape of d’Artagnan, backlit by candlelight from the adjoining room.

“It’s alright, d’Artagnan,” he said, but it was only a strangled whisper, and he cleared his throat and tried again. “I’m fine. Just a dream. Go back to sleep.”

“You sure?” d’Artagnan sounded sleepy and young, and Athos wanted to say, “Come to bed with me,” but he knew that was madness. Instead he said, “I’m sure. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“G’night, then,” d’Artagnan said, retreating into his room and closing the door behind him, leaving Athos once again in darkness.

*****

Where his master was lean and pale like the belly of a dead thing, Beaumont was stocky, dark-haired and flush with an unhealthy ruddiness that suggested he spent either a great deal of time out of doors or in a tavern—perhaps both.

They found him breaking his fast in the kitchen, a scullery maid perched nervously on his knee. Judging by the rapidity with which she used their appearance to flee, the girl didn’t much care for Beaumont, and neither did Athos after the man’s opening salvo.

Beaumont twisted his greasy lips into a salacious sneer and said, “Back for more, eh? Couldn’t keep away?” to d’Artagnan, ignoring Athos altogether for the moment and clearly expecting a rise out of the younger man. He licked his lips and gave a lewd, knowing wink.

Athos wanted to see if the blood under his skin was indeed as red as it looked, but he was prevented from striking the odious steward by a gesture from d’Artagnan, who had given him the signal they used during sorties, the one that meant, _Hold_.

“As you know, we are here at the behest of your lord and master. If you don’t want to help us, we will be glad to tell him so, but since he sent us to you specifically, I should think you’d prefer to answer our questions civilly and with a minimum of your usual…digressions.”

Athos had had occasion to hear him assume what he privately called d’Artganan’s “court voice,” but it was typically far politer and significantly less threatening than the manner in which he used it now. He was clearly reminding Beaumont of his station in the household and that d’Artagnan, though poor, was nevertheless a nobleman by birth.

From Beaumont’s reaction, it was clear that he understood that he was being put in his place and that he had strong feelings about it. His face turned an alarming shade of purple, and Athos had a moment of worry that he was choking on his breakfast before the steward reached for his mug of morning brew and slugged down a long draught.

He put the wooden tankard down with a bang and then made a show of smearing the grease on his lips across his cheek with the back of one beefy hand before he shoved back the bench on which he’d been sitting, hitched up his belt with both hands, and let out a long, odorous belch.

“Put on all the airs you want around me, you pervert. Them clothes and that pointy sword don’t fool me none, and no amount of swagger can hide the kind of ‘man’ you really are. Milord knows it as well as I, and it ain’t goin’ to make no bit o’ difference to him what I do or don’t say to you. We both know what happened to that fancy son o’ his, don’t we?”

Athos moved his hand to the hilt of his sword, an automatic reaction not so much to the steward’s words as his tone. He’d heard that same depth of contempt before, directed at him, and he knew just how treacherous such a feeling could be, what it could drive a person to do.

“You seem awfully sure of what befell Jean-Marie, Beaumont. I wonder if it’s because you had something to do with it. You have a history of losing control, after all.”

Though Athos had no idea what d’Artagnan was referring to, it was clearly something that alarmed and enraged the steward, for Beaumont lost his color as swiftly as he had gained it just moments before. He clenched his hands and lunged toward d’Artagnan, only to be brought up short by the point of Athos’ sword, which he had drawn without conscious volition.

“Thank you for proving my point,” d’Artagnan said, and there was a cold disdain in his voice that Athos had never heard before. In fact, the whole trip so far had been a series of revelations leading Athos to the inevitable conclusion that he hadn’t really known d’Artagnan at all.

He didn’t have time to reflect on the observation, however, for Beaumont was vibrating with barely leashed fury and d’Artagnan was wearing an expression of profound scorn that aged him by a decade and made Athos sheathe his blade.

d’Artagnan didn’t need his protection here.

“Sit down,” d’Artagnan said, gesturing toward the bench the steward had just vacated. “And tell us everything you know—or think you know—about Jean-Marie’s disappearance.”

Though Athos was d’Artagnan’s superior officer and also the more experienced inquisitor, he was content to let d’Artagnan take the lead in this particular interrogation. For one thing, he sensed that d’Artagnan’s history with the steward would lend him insight Athos himself could not possibly possess. For another, he feared that d’Artagnan might turn that same expression of cold abhorrence on Athos if Athos interfered.

He’d give d’Artagnan the rope and see what interesting knots he made with it.

“Tell us what you found when you went to the camp the day after the midsummer revel.”

“I didn’t find anything, did I?” Beaumont answered, face twisting in contempt. “The boy weren’t there, were he, or you’d never have been allowed back here. Still wouldn’t be, if I had anything to say about it.”

“But you don’t,” d’Artagnan pointed out, and before Beaumont could rise to the bait, he went on, “Was there any sign of struggle, anything at all out of place?”

“Yer not gettin’ it, are you, boy?” Beaumont sneered. “There weren’t nothing there—no sign at all that the gypsies had been. How likely is that, d’ya think, coupla dozen folk sharing a clearing for weeks on end and no sign of ‘em ever bein’ there?”

“What explanation do you have for this strange phenomenon?” Athos cut in, curiosity getting the better of his earlier intention of keeping mum.

Beaumont shrugged expansively. “How’m I to know?” He showed his palms, as though he were just a helpless innocent in the face of such mysteries.

“You always know things you aren’t supposed to,” d’Artagnan observed, casually, almost absently, stroking the pommel of his sword. “It’s your raison d’etre.”

Beamont’s lips made a moue of distaste. “Ain’t you the fancy boy,” he sneered. “As it happens, I wasn’t around the gypsy camp much this season. I had other business…for the master, like.”

Athos caught the hesitation in his statement, however, and even as he was speculating on what kind of personal business a man like Beaumont might get up to, d’Artagnan was saying, “I don’t believe you. Your business relies on knowing everyone else’s. You weren’t working for the Comte. You were doing your own bit of spying, weren’t you, so you could blackmail some hapless fool who had the misfortune to fall into your sights. Who was it?”

“That’s none o’ yer concern. All you need to know’s that I didn’t know the gypsies was leavin’, and I have no idea where they went nor if they took that sorry excuse for a son with ‘em. Far as I’m concerned, it’s good riddance. Damned catamite brought nothing but sorrow to his daddy and this noble family.”

“Is that a sentiment you’ve shared with the Comte, I wonder?” Athos’ tone was dry enough to crack leather, but Beaumont just gave an exaggerated roll of his eyes and blew a raspberry, spewing bits of egg and sausage across the table that the timid scullery maid had just swabbed.

“The Comte is a man of the world. He knows what’s what. He keeps to his part and I keep to mine, and that’s how we both like it.”

It was clear that they weren’t getting anything more out of the steward, and without another word or any further acknowledgement of the man, d’Artagnan turned on his heel and strode from the kitchen, snagging a fresh loaf of bread, a wedge of cheese, and a couple of apples from a table as he went. Athos followed, giving a rare smile to the maid, who was staring open-mouthed at d’Artagnan’s retreating back.

He couldn’t blame her—d’Artagnan made a fine figure, particularly when he put a certain swagger in his stride, such as he had done just then for the benefit of the cook, who had been about to scold him for the theft.

She, too, though much older than the maid and clearly a veteran of many a household war, was blushing a little and trying to hide a giggle behind her apron.

For his part, Athos strove to remember his dignity, and he departed with as little swagger as the uniform of a Musketeer and a long sword in a swinging scabbard would allow.

*****

They shared the apples but little by way of discussion on the short ride out to the site of the gypsy camp.

Situated on a pleasant bank above a burbling stream, ghostly morning mists rising into the blossom-scented air, the meadow where the gypsies had camped seemed wholly innocuous. Across the stream, an orchard gone to seed provided busy work for humming bees, who labored over the fallen fruit. When a light morning breeze crossed the water, it carried the scent of cider.

It was hard to imagine that such a charming place might have been the scene of any sort of violence.

Athos said as much in the quiet tone the place encouraged in him. The very air was alive with some subtle current, and it seemed to Athos as though the stream was speaking in a language he might almost grasp, if only he paid closer attention. He found himself straining to understand whatever message rock and water might offer.

“Do you hear something?” d’Artagnan asked him from downstream, where he was standing beside an ersatz footbridge made of half-submerged stones.

Athos gave a huff of self-conscious laughter and shook his head. “No. I was just looking for some clue as to the gypsies’ whereabouts. Do _you_ hear anything?”

d’Artagnan seemed to flush, a guilty little smile playing about his lips, and he shook his head, turning away and making an unusually awkward step onto the first of the stepping stones. Arms windmilling, he eventually regained his balance and crossed the rest of the way without incident, making the farther bank and hastening up it to the edge of the overgrown orchard.

“Don’t go too far,” Athos cautioned, unsure of the origin of his sudden uneasiness. It wasn’t as though the orchard were a vast, untamed wilderness, and besides, d’Artagnan was more familiar with the woods in this region than Athos was. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling that if d’Artagnan were to stray into the shadows of the fragrant trees, drooping branches heavy with wormy fruit, Athos would never see him again.

d’Artagnan gave him an abstracted look and a desultory wave, as though he were distracted by something that only he could hear, and Athos moved with some haste to cross the stream himself.

By the time he reached the far bank, d’Artagnan was only a blurred shape receding down the avenue of bent, gnarled branches. Surely that had to be an odd trick of the hazy light; he couldn’t be so far away.

Athos cried, “d’Artagnan, wait!” and it seemed to him that the other paused, hesitating, face half-turned back toward Athos.

Athos hurried to catch up with his companion, but he’d only made it half the distance between them when d’Artagnan was drawn back toward whatever was luring him deeper into the orchard, beneath whose strange branches the shadows seemed darker than nature and the time of day could account for.

Athos began to feel dizzy, the ground swooping and churning under his feet as though he were drunk. Having had ample practice at overcoming that particular sensation, however, Athos kept his feet, doggedly pursuing d’Artagnan as the younger man moved away.

Reaching the spot where d’Artagnan had paused, Athos did likewise, peering into the murk ahead in desperation, no longer able to make out d’Artagnan’s figure. Looking over his shoulder, Athos saw only a narrowing aureole of light where the orchard ended at the stream’s bank.

How is that possible? Athos thought to himself, stumbling forward, stomach roiling at the increased instability of the earth under him. The light seemed to be seeping out of the air around him, and the odor of rotten apples, once pleasant, began to overwhelm him, the tart, fermented stench making him sicker still.

At last, he pitched forward onto his hands and heaved onto the ground between them, watching in terrible astonishment as worms worked their way out of the putrid, brown mess of crushed apples to swim in his sick and feed on it.

Athos cried out, pushed away from the ground, and regained his feet. He stood there, spraddle-legged and uncertain, and called, “d’Artagnan?” once more, his wrecked throat producing only a meager mewl of sound.

He blinked furiously, trying to clear his blurred eyesight, and focused on keeping his feet as he took a hesitant step, and then another, and finally a third and fourth, until he was staggering forward like he was three sheets to the wind on the deck of a storm-tossed ship.

His gasping breath sounded loud in his ears, but over the efforts of his heart to pound its way out of his chest, Athos thought he heard a flute, clear notes high and sweet, the only point of certainty in a world turned suddenly chaotic.

He paused in his stumbling, took a deep breath, and listened as hard as he could. There! A second instrument had joined the flute, what sounded like a lyre or a harp, and then a third note came, slow and repetitive, a drum grounding the fanciful flights of the other two.

It seemed to Athos as though the path between the trees, which had narrowed until the branches were bridged over his head and the trunks were nearly brushing his shoulders on either side, had suddenly broadened once more, and a clearing appeared ahead, lit by a murky glow, as of a lantern submerged beneath green water.

He knew it could not be so, but he was overcome at once with direst curiosity, and so he moved ahead again, pleased that the ground seemed steadier beneath his feet, and though his stomach still swam queasily, his dizziness had passed, leaving him light-headed but largely clear-eyed.

d’Artagnan was nowhere to be found in the dim clearing, but in the center was a deep pool of water, bordered on three sides by fragrant lilies, their waxy heads bobbing sleepily over the water. The fourth side, nearest his approach, was dominated by a wide, flat rock, glassy and black, which reflected the eerie fern-green light of the water.

Helpless to resist the impulse, Athos dropped to his knees beside the water and gazed into the pool, seeing not the still reflection of the lilies nor his own staring face but the source of the light itself, seemingly within reach, if only he plunged his hands into the water.

Athos struggled mightily against the compulsion, sensing that here was a treacherous deception indeed, but with horror he found his sword hand moving inevitably toward the surface of the pond. As his fingers plunged into the cool water, his nostrils filled suddenly with the heady odor of lilies, drowning-strong. He cried out and tried to draw his hand back but found that the more he resisted, the quicker he was pulled face-first toward the pond’s preternaturally still surface.

At the last moment, Athos took a deep breath, and then his nose touched the water, his brow, his lips, and he was submerged, his body slipping eel-like into the depths without any further apparent coercion.

He opened his eyes, searching for the light, which grew brighter and wider in his near sight, until he believed his striving fingers must grasp it and free him from the overpowering desire for its touch.

Some distant, rational part of the Musketeer was alarmed at the way his lungs began to burn with the need to draw breath, but Athos still strained toward the ever-receding green light, desperate, enthralled, undone.

*****

“You shouldn’t a hit ‘im,” Porthos noted mildly as they rode away from Castelmore toward the location of the clearing, which Aramis had just extracted from the sneering steward.

It had taken some persuasion of the physical variety. Porthos’ remark wasn’t so much grounded in remorse over Aramis’ uncharacteristic loss of temper as it was his lover’s bruised and reddened knuckles, which the other Musketeer was sucking on as they rode.

In point of fact, Porthos was wishing it was his lips on Aramis’ hand, and he was finding it not a little distracting, what with the riding and all.

Aramis spared Porthos a rueful glance and gave a short nod before dropping his abused hand to his thigh.

Porthos pretended his examination of the hand was only for the sake of his lover’s injury, but of course, the play of muscles under Aramis’ leather trousers was another distraction. At this rate, they might not make it to the site of the gypsy camp, no matter that it was less than a half-league from the chateau.

“Focus,” Aramis chided, but there was a teasing lilt to his voice that recalled their mutual pleasure at last night’s unexpected privacy. It wasn’t often that they got to spend a night under the stars, just the two of them on a mission away from Paris.

Two days earlier, Treville had called them from the practice yard and given them the news that Athos and d’Artagnan were missing and that the Comte de Castelmore had been laggard in reporting this news to the captain.

“Six days they’ve been gone,” Treville had said, suppressed worry tightening his voice. “I don’t know why the ba— Comte didn’t inform us sooner.” The uncharacteristic slip had showed them even more than his careful expression just how anxious he was.

“Is there some reason to believe they’re in danger? I mean, aside from the obvious—they’re missing, and they’re Athos and d’Artagnan.” As usual, Aramis had a way of putting things into wry perspective, and Treville’s sharp nod had seemed to suggest that he took the man’s point.

“The mission they were sent on is…sensitive. I don’t have all the details myself, but the initial request for help came directly from the Comte, and he specifically asked that d’Artagnan be involved in investigating his son’s disappearance. I sensed at the time that something wasn’t right, but… .”

“But it’s d’Artagnan and Athos,” Porthos reiterated.

“Precisely.”

“Did d’Artagnan indicate why it was that the Comte might want him personally?”

Treville had pondered Aramis’ reasonable question just a little too long to make his answer entirely natural and then shook his head in mute frustration.

“I got the impression that d’Artagnan was quite close with the Comte’s son once upon a time, but I didn’t speak to him directly. I wanted to give Athos that duty. I thought the lad would be more likely to confide in his mentor than he would in me.”

“I guess we’ll just have to find out for ourselves,” Porthos had said in his typical straightforward fashion.

And here they were, having visited Castelmore, wrung information out of a supremely unwilling steward—the Comte himself had been “too occupied,” according to the aforementioned jackass, to see them himself—and taken the road out to the meadow to which d’Artagnan and Athos had been headed the last time anyone in the area had seen them.

“Nine days is a long time,” Porthos observed. There was nothing in his tone to indicate alarm, but Aramis could read between the lines, so to speak.

“This far from any recorded open conflict? Yes.”

“Not likely gypsies could get the jump on both of ‘em, either.”

“No.” Aramis managed to make the single syllable sound especially ominous. His friends—and surely, d’Artagnan was his friend, though they had only shared a handful of experiences so far—were not the sort to disappear without a trace. No, had something evil befallen them, there should have been a swath of bloody evidence left in the wake of it.

“There’s nothing here.”

They’d hove into sight of the clearing the steward had so reluctantly described, and as he’d insisted through a fattened, bloodied lip, there was nothing to see: No wagon wheel tracks, no crushed grass, no blood drops or drag marks—no sign at all of a struggle.

Meadowlarks dipped and trilled over the breeze-blown grass. The field was a quilt sewn with the spiky stars of burdock and the bushy blush of thyme in pink bloom. Nearby, a stream purled merrily along in its green swell of bank.

The sweet rot of windfall apples made Aramis’ horse nicker as he urged him forward into the center of the clearing, but that was the only sound to disturb the idyllic late summer scene.

“Do you hear something?” Porthos asked, even as Aramis was saying, “Is that music?”

“It’s coming from over there,” Porthos noted, pointing to an overgrown orchard on the far bank of the stream.

“Let’s go,” Aramis said, and they went.


	2. Fae of Our Fathers

The face Athos saw in his dream bore little resemblance to d’Artagnan but for the limpid, swimming brown eyes, that hovered anxiously over him. Otherwise, the cheekbones were too defined, the smile somehow toothier, the ears pointier. Even the beloved eyes tilted strangely, more cat-like and wider by far than they’d been.

And was his skin translucent, glowing from within like he had swallowed spreading fire?

So disoriented was he by this not-d’Artagnan, Athos didn’t realize at once that he was actually conscious, his eyes open, sight clearing.

As he at last grasped what he was seeing, Athos’ patented stoicism slipped, and he bit off a startled cry as he tried to move away from the alien visage. Of course, as he was prone on what he now recognized was a soft mattress, there was really nowhere for him to go, but thankfully, the figure receded, giving Athos the breathing space to gather himself.

“Forgive me,” he began, intending to apologize for his reaction and explain that the…creature…looking at him bore a passing resemblance to someone he knew.

“Athos, it’s alright,” a familiar voice said, and though he was looking directly at the stranger and saw his lips moving, Athos didn’t quite understand what was happening until the stranger, a look of anguish on his face, said, “It’s me, Athos— _d’Artagnan_.”

Athos didn’t think he’d been drinking, but as he couldn’t quite remember where he was or how he’d gotten there, he supposed he must have been—indeed, drinking so much that he’d passed out and then regained consciousness, only to find himself caught in delirium tremens.

But when he held a hand up in front of his face, he saw that it was merely trembling slightly, not at all jerking with palsy the way he’d witnessed in poor sots overcome by their compulsions.

Athos levered himself up onto his elbows and observed his surroundings, determined for the moment to ignore the strange figment of his imagination still staring at him with a pained expression, half hope, half hopeless sorrow.

He was lying on a deep mattress on a wide bed covered in a diaphanous, light linen that was smooth and cool to the touch and had a strange luminosity about it, as though it had been woven from starlight and moonglow. The room he was in was high-ceilinged and airy, vaulting held in place by beams of some light wood that gently cast back the glow of beeswax candles scenting the air with lavender and pine.

There were windows at intervals high on the walls, made of single panes of palest green glass, so that everything in the room took on a faint vermilion glow, as if they were close beneath the surface of a sunlit pond.

Green…green water.

The pool!

Memory startling him to action, Athos threw the linen off of him and swung his legs over the side of the bed. As his bare feet touched the floor, he realized three things simultaneously:

He was bootless.

He was naked.

And he was utterly unsure he could stand on his own.

Swallowing around the bile that rose in his throat as his stomach heaved in protest at the sudden movement, Athos took deep breaths through his nose and closed his eyes against the dizzy swoop of the room.

When his stomach settled, he chanced opening his eyes, pleased to see that the room had at last settled down.

The stranger with d’Artagnan’s eyes and voice was still standing at the foot of the bed, still staring at him helplessly, but now he was holding a finely woven shirt of the same pale green as the windows and a pair of trousers that seemed to be made of some soft, light brown fabric. Of smalls and boots, there were no signs, but Athos would take what he could get.

He nodded to the end of the bed, and not-d’Artagnan left the clothing there and considerately turned his back.

“Where am I?” he asked tersely as he pulled the trousers on and risked standing up to pull them up. They fastened with a simple tie at the top and were looser and lighter than he was used to.

“That’s…going to take some explaining.” For a moment, there was something so achingly familiar in the other’s rueful tone that Athos was almost convinced it was, indeed, d’Artagnan.

As he shrugged into his shirt and took a better look at his surroundings—delicately carved desk in one corner, likewise delicate stool tucked beneath it; dry sink, basin, and pitcher; closed armoire of some fabulous design, exotic arabesques carved into its doors; a single door into the room, closed, with a sturdy silver bolt—nothing delicate about that—driven to, not locking him in, Athos noted interestedly, but keeping someone (or some _thing_ ) out.

“I trust we have time,” Athos said, gesturing at the bolted door.

“Not as much as I would like,” the other muttered, and again Athos was struck by the familiarity of his voice. He screwed up his courage to look—really look—at the stranger, who squirmed beneath the scrutiny, color rising in his cheeks.

Besides the mutation of his features—everything attenuated, as if his head had been stretched long-ways—there was the strangeness of his clothes, richer and costlier than anything d’Artagnan (or indeed, Athos himself, even in his earlier days) had ever owned. And there was something about his demeanor, his minute gestures, the tilt of his head. No, this creature was not d’Artagnan: He (for the figure was decidedly male—where Athos’ trousers were loose-fitting, the other’s were tight, as if designed specifically to make a point of his maleness) was a simulacrum, as if someone had set out to take all of d’Artagnan’s thoughtless grace and natural poise, his masculine beauty and lithe strength—in short, everything that made d’Artagnan an exceptional specimen of the human male figure, Michaelangelo’s wet dream—and with a few deliberate strokes emphasize in every way how _inhuman_ this copy was.

Athos couldn’t put his finger on it, and it was driving him mad and making him angry.

“Where is d’Artagnan? I want to see him now.” He put all the cold command of both his military service and his upbringing into the order.

“You’re looking at him,” the creature cried, hands up in a pleading gesture, face twisted with grief and desperation. “Athos, please. I know this is—this is _crazy_ —but please, you have to believe me! It’s me, d’Artagnan. Here, look!”

As if he’d only just remembered it, d’Artagnan jerked frantically at his tunic to reveal the beauty of the butterfly tattooed on his chest. If before the colors had been lush and vibrant, now they were almost pulsing with life, as though at any moment the delicate winged thing would launch itself from his body and flutter about the room.

As he had been before, Athos was overcome by an almost irresistible desire to touch the living art, as much to see if it was truly alive as to feel the beating heart of d’Artagnan under his fingers.

For, indeed, Athos had finally accepted that it was d’Artagnan standing across the room from him. He didn’t know how it could be or what had happened to his friend, only that he could no longer—would no longer—deny d’Artagnan the comfort of his acknowledgement.

“I believe you,” he whispered, words barely audible as they rushed out of him with his breath. “I believe you,” he repeated, moving forward without conscious thought, d’Artagnan bridging the distance between them in two long strides, Athos at last feeling the smooth, warm skin beneath his fingers.

At his touch, d’Artagnan cried out, and Athos withdrew his hand, watching in horrified fascination as the tattoo actually came to life, the black lines of the wings pulling away from d’Artagnan’s skin, the colors lush and translucent as the creature lifted away and banked, light shimmering through its stained glass wings.

Remembering his fever dream, Athos fixed his eyes on d’Artagnan’s chest, relieved to see not a gaping hole but a smooth plane of unblemished skin where the tattoo had once been.

“What—?” he began, unsure which question to ask first, but before he could formulate a complete thought d’Artagnan’s eyes slid closed, and Athos had only a moment to act, catching d’Artagnan as he swayed and collapsed, pulse fluttering wildly at his throat, butterfly beating frantic wings against his suddenly pale lips.

The creatures that broke down the door at Athos’ cry for aid were not interested in his protestations of innocence.

One of them pinned him effortlessly to the wall beside his bed, holding him with one hand by the throat and raising him until only his toes touched the floor. As Athos tried to explain that he hadn’t done anything to harm d’Artagnan, the creature turned his storm-grey eyes away, leaving Athos with a limited view of what the two others were doing to the young Musketeer.

One, hair so fair it was almost white and with shoulders impressively broad, was trying to capture the butterfly in his cupped hands. The other, similarly fair but slighter of build, was murmuring in a strange tongue, its hand pressed to the spot on d’Artagnan’s chest where the now-living tattoo had been.

Athos didn’t see what they did next, for his vision was narrowing as his breath was squeezed out of him. He tried to ask what they were doing, tried to beg them not to hurt d’Artagnan, but all that came out was a sighing wheeze.

The creature throttling him turned his eyes back to Athos to give him an appraising look, not as one man measures another’s potential but rather as a breeder of horses considers a stud in the sale paddock.

Something in his stare made Athos feel both deeply ashamed and a little aroused, responses he ruthlessly ignored in favor of taking a breath through his abused throat when the creature at last relented a little in his hold.

“Please,” he said when he could. “Don’t hurt him.”

The slighter of the two fair-haired ones made a vague, dismissive gesture in Athos’ direction, and his captor grasped him by the shoulders and man-handled him with embarrassing ease out of the room.

He spent the next several hours in a room almost identical to the last, similarly appointed with bed, basin, desk, armoire. He took the time to clean himself up, splashing the pleasantly scented water onto his face and neck, running wet fingers through his hair and beard, and drying himself with a soft towel of butter yellow.

A bored survey of the armoire’s contents discovered trousers and shirts similar to those he wore, as well as tighter trousers and richly embroidered tunics like d’Artagnan’s attire. He was fingering the fine gold threadwork of a green-and-sunfire vest when the door to his chamber opened and the raven-haired creature appeared.

“You will come with me,” he said, turning his back without waiting to see that Athos would obey. Words, tone, and posture all asserted that Athos would be wholly obedient. For his part, Athos was tempted to delay or resist; he had no patience for being treated like a slave.

But there was the hope that his captor would lead him to d’Artagnan, and Athos’ worry for d’Artagnan was of considerably more weight than his wounded pride.

Unfortunately, d’Artagnan was nowhere to be seen as Athos was led into a third room, this one larger and more elaborately appointed than the others he’d seen, clearly intended as an audience chamber, if the raised dais and carved chairs at the far end of the space were any indication.

Athos was led down a gauntlet of marching columns that soared to the vaulted ceiling high above. Each column was carved into the life-sized figure of a creature like those that stood at intervals, holding gleaming, dark-wood pikes tipped with vicious silver points. The faces of the guards might have been carved from wood, too, for all the expressions they revealed as Athos was paraded by.

But the face of the creature waiting on the dais did bear a distinct expression, her disdain easily readable in the way her mouth turned up in condescension at one corner and in the supercilious arc of one eyebrow. Cool green eyes, colder than the sea they resembled, stared at him, assessing. Even as Athos watched, he saw himself failing whatever test he’d been undergoing.

The raven-haired guard bowed formally as he presented his prisoner, and it was this obviously habitual humility that brought home to Athos just how much trouble he was in. If his taciturn captor was driven to fearful obsequiousness by the creature before them, Athos was in serious jeopardy indeed.

She didn’t look like much. Her most striking feature were those eyes, fierce with intelligence and hungry for something Athos couldn’t identify, but her chestnut hair, which cascaded over pert breasts in a shining river to her narrow waist; her somewhat plain, almost child-like features; and her slight build, fragile at wrists and throat, made her seem unthreatening.

Still, there was an unmistakable air of authority about her, and that she ruled through respectful fear was apparent not only in his captor’s refusal to meet her eyes but in the way the guards around the gallery kept their eyes locked ahead of them, offering her only blank profiles, as if to give her their gazes was to court destruction.

He waited to be spoken to and avoided her eyes, keeping them instead firmly fixed on the floor between her tiny, slippered feet. The silence extended until he thought he could hear music from a distant room and, somewhere closer, voices raised in argument.

Her impatient sigh broke the tense silence, and then, in a surprisingly sweet, musical voice, she said, “By what name do you pledge fealty to Cainson?”

He didn’t know to whom she referred, but Athos understood the rest of the question well enough: “I am Athos, King’s Musketeer, of Paris.” Shy of baring his secrets to strangers, Athos also did not know how his title would be taken in this court, so he withheld it until a time when it might be better used.

“You are a warrior?” She used the word like it meant “whore” or “cutpurse” and didn’t seem to worry about offending the guards who lined her gallery, presumably prepared to defend her to the death. Then again, for all Athos knew, they might just be there to fulfill other, perhaps less violent, purposes. Perhaps the pikestaffs were symbolic.

He wasn’t tempted to test his prurient little theory.

“I serve my king,” he answered, still without meeting her eyes. Now, though, he was staring at an indeterminate space over her right shoulder.

“And Cainson, do you serve him?” Athos let his eyes scan her face, just the briefest of touches, and what he saw there was not reassuring. There was a dark, teasing light in her eyes that made him wary.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, offering an apologetic bow. “I’m unfamiliar with that name…”

She hissed like a cat, and his eyes caught on her face, cupid’s bow of a mouth open, sharp little teeth prominent, something feral in her eyes.

“You dare lie to me?”

There was nothing remotely musical about her voice now. It had descended into the lower octaves and was rough with a kind of muted growl that raised the hair on the back of Athos’ neck.

“M’lady,” he said, risking an inappropriate title rather than continuing to refrain from any at all, “I assure you, I am not lying. This one you call Cainson, is he—?”

The door behind and to the right of the dais burst open, and through it raced a figure, tall, dark-haired, and wholly human, whose eyes caught Athos’ just before the intruder had to duck and throw himself to one side, narrowly avoiding the pikestaff that swept at him from behind.

“You dare enter my throne-room unbidden?” the creature on the dais screeched, rising from her throne to stalk to the edge of the dais and look down on the man, who was now pinned in place by Athos’ own captor.

“My queen, I beg that you hear me. I would not have dared your wrath were it not urgent for your safety that you be told—”

Whatever dire message he had to offer was cut off by the raven-haired creature, who, with the slightest, casual gesture, had knocked the man unconscious.

“See to his disposal,” the Queen ordered, not giving the man another glance.

The raven-haired creature bowed in obeisance and then lifted the man over his shoulder without the merest sign of effort.

Athos swallowed, wondering what kind of demise awaited the would-be messenger.

“Are you responsible for this interruption?” the Queen asked, moving to the dais directly in front of Athos. Athos dropped his eyes and tried to look unthreatening.

“My Lady, I assure you, I have no knowledge of that man.”

At this, the queen spat, a globule of white landing on the top of Athos’ bare left foot.

“A second lie, human. You tread on most dangerous ground. Beware the curse of three.”

“My Lady—” he began, hoping that inspiration would strike from the blue, and he would find the magic words to release him from this nightmare.

“Wait!” a familiar voice cried from behind him, and Athos turned to see d’Artagnan striding down the length of the gallery, apparently unchallenged by the guards, who made no move to prevent his forward progress.

“I claim this man for my service, Queen Serei, and further beg your mercy for Jean-Marie’s sake. He has not made the transition to the Faire as well as this one has.” D’Artagnan nodded to indicate Athos himself, who was surprised to learn that Jean-Marie de Castelmore was apparently the young man who’d just interrupted his interrogation; that they were in a place called ‘The Faire’; and, most astonishing of all, that d’Artagnan was in a position to look the queen in the eye and ask anything at all of her.

Whether or not Queen Serei would oblige d’Artagnan was a matter of some dispute. Thunderclouds seemed to darken the ocean blue of her eyes, and her lips turned down into a grimace. But she did not hiss or spit or otherwise express outward displeasure, and Athos thought that was an improvement over her earlier methods of communicating.

At last, narrowed eyes glistening with both ire and a dreadful humor, like a child who enjoys burning the hair off her dolls even while she misses their silky locks, Queen Serei said, “It is curious, Nephew, the attachment you have to humans. Still, I can understand the appeal. This one is particularly…toothsome.”

Her smile was ghastly, preternaturally sharp teeth and poisonous pink tongue, and Athos had to suppress a shudder. He was trying to stand very, very still and was looking down, only catching glimpses of her through his lashes, not wanting to attract further attention or influence in a negative way her answer to d’Artagnan’s request.

“Very well. But hear me, Cainson: These humans are your responsibility, and I am suffering them but sorely. The next time one of them offends me, I will have them eaten, and then you and I will come to a new understanding. Are we at an accord on this matter?”

D’Artagnan gave a bow, not as deep or lasting as the raven-haired captor’s had been, and adopted a pleasantly neutral expression. “My lady, you are, as ever, fair.”

Athos had not been there long, but he understood that d’Artagnan was mocking her in some way when further clouds rolled across her eyes and her fingers tightened perceptibly on the arms of her throne.

Then she laughed, a sound that made it feel as though his muscles were being scraped away from his bone, as if he were being flayed alive in a terrible kind of intimacy, everything he was, would be, or had been exposed for every alien eye to judge. He did shudder then, wracked with chasing shivers that left him breathless.

Tears pooled in his eyes and ran down his cheeks. Snot trailed from his nose and spit from his lips, and with horror he felt his bowels and bladder loosening. Athos clapped his hands over his ears to shut out the awful noise, clenched his teeth and breathed wetly through his nose, desperate not to humiliate himself further before this creature who tormented him thus.

“Enough!” d’Artagnan commanded, his voice changed from the one Athos had known, resonant with power, like a distant war gong being struck with dire intent.

The laughter stopped, and it was all Athos could do to remain upright as he wiped the back of his hand over his nose and mouth and tried to remember what it was to be strong.

“You overstep, Nephew,” Queen Serei said, but there was a strange quirk to her mouth that suggested amusement rather than anger.

Athos was tired of being a source of comedy for this _thing_ , and it was that exhaustion of spirit that overrode his common sense.

“If you are going to kill me, would you be so good as to get it over with? All this posturing is quite tiring, and I’ve already had something of a day.” He adopted the bored dilettante’s voice that he and Thomas used to use to mimic some of their more foppish peers back in the days when they had still believed that lords of the manor could also be masters of their own destinies.

The queen’s eyes snapped to his, and Athos met her gaze unflinchingly. He had meant what he had said: He wasn’t going to suffer being a plaything for her any more. He was already sick to death of being a pawn in her nasty game, and he’d only been in “the Faire,” as they called it, a few hours. He had gotten quite enough of being manipulated for royal purposes in his daily life as a Musketeer.

Besides, he hadn’t forgotten all of what he’d learned in his years as scion of a powerful noble family: Sometimes offense was the only defense, particularly where family politics were involved, and it was obvious that d’Artagnan and the queen were, as fantastical as it all seemed, related by blood.

To his infinite surprise, the queen did not turn him into a gooey red paste at once. Instead, she threw back her head and laughed a different kind of laugh, this one a fluting lilt of sound that sent shivers of an entirely different kind down Athos’ back. He felt things stirring low in his belly, and his breath quickened, but before he could embarrass himself further, she stopped, eyes alight, cheeks flushed: She looked disconcertingly like a human girl, despite teeth and sharp tongue and pointed ears.

“Oh, Nephew, I think I _will_ grant you your boon with this one. You deserve what you get with him.”

It was not really a compliment.

“And Jean-Marie?”

She lost her girlish smile. “He has violated the sanctity of this chamber. He must be punished. Still…if he is seeking your favor…” She let her words trail off, inconclusive.

d’Artagnan hastened to say, “He is under my protection, Aunt Serei.” Using her familial title instead of her royal one was an obvious bid, but it worked, if her grudging, unhappy nod meant anything.

“He will be punished but not permanently harmed. Fetch him at the Arboretum.”

Something stiffened in d’Artagnan’s face, and Athos could see the tension drawing his shoulders tight, but d’Artagnan merely approximated a bow by bending his neck, and said, “Raven, you will follow,” before turning on his heel and marching back the way he’d come, down that long gallery flanked on either side by stone-faced guards.

To Athos’ weary surprise, the black-haired creature who had tried to kill him stepped forward, gestured Athos toward the far door, and followed him down the gallery and out into a wide foyer bordered on two sides by long benches already half full of petitioners.

Some of them, Athos noted distractedly, were dressed as he was, in what seemed to be the Faire’s version of poorer cloth, and were fearful-eyed, reluctant. Others, haughtier of eye and less apprehensive, were clothed more finely.

d’Artagnan acknowledged none of the petitioners as he strode confidently through their ranks and down a hallway that branched off to the left. This quickly narrowed to an ordinary corridor, and by the absence of fine trappings, Athos assumed it was a sort of service hallway meant to provide an efficient route for the various household duties being undertaken by the pale, pinch-faced, dwarf-sized creatures scuttling to and fro as if their lives depended on making deliveries of linens and fruits. Of course, they probably did.

“What are—” he started to ask, and Raven poked him in the back none too gently, indicating that he should just keep walking.

Athos did, though he felt his tenuous grip on patience sliding away, and he’d just about decided to take a stand outside a closed door from whose keyhole and lintel steam belched in intermittent clouds when d’Artagnan stopped a few yards ahead, used a key to open a narrow, non-descript door, and indicated that Athos should follow him.

“Wait here and let no one in,” d’Artagnan ordered Raven, who gave a curt nod of acquiescence and fell into the timeless posture of a guard: One hand on his sword pommel, the other relaxed at his side, eyes ahead and face unwelcoming.

Through the door, Athos found that they were pressed together on a narrow landing before a set of even narrower, winding stairs that disappeared around a corner and into darkness.

As reluctant as he was to go down into the unknown, he was even more loth to stay where he was, where every breath he took brushed his chest against d’Artagnan’s arm.

d’Artagnan looked down at him with his alien features and that familiar, devilish smile in his eyes. He knew exactly what Athos was thinking, which was a feat, since Athos himself felt awhirl with confusion.

“Shall we?” d’Artagnan asked, gesturing down the flight into darkness.

“Why not?” Athos answered, comfort creeping over him at d’Artagnan’s easy manner. “I haven’t had an adventure in ages.”

d’Artagnan’s laugh didn’t have the unnatural power of his aunt’s, but it aroused him just as surely and far more naturally than hers had. He swallowed a surprised breath, turned his eyes to the first step, and let himself be led down.

*****

Porthos and Aramis awoke in circumstances that could only be called unpropitious. Naked, wet, and cold, they were bound at wrists and ankles in cords both fibrous and slimy and from which no amount of struggling could extract them.

Panting from the exertion of trying to free themselves, they lay back to back. At least that single aspect of their lives together hadn’t changed: They faced each other’s danger together.

“Does it seem like there’s a light over there?” Porthos asked, indicating with his chin what he thought might be the eastern horizon. Of course, Aramis could see neither the gesture nor the direction, but he said, “Maybe?” through chattering teeth anyway.

“I think there’s light.” Porthos invested the words with his characteristic refusal to acknowledge defeat, and hearing them caused a flush of warmth in Aramis that had nothing at all to do with their physical condition.

“Well, then, let’s see about another way to free ourselves from this tangle, shall we?”

“I think I can feel a rock under my arse,” Porthos replied, and it wasn’t really a non-sequitur.

“I can help you get that,” Aramis answered, and Porthos’ knowing chuckle fanned the flame he’d already lit in Aramis’ passionate heart.

*****

“So you’re a _fairy_?”

Athos’ skepticism was tempered by d’Artagnan’s clearly powerful discomfort into a kind of gentle remonstrance, as though he’d caught a particularly sensitive child in an especially unlikely lie.

“For lack of a better term in your world, yes, I’m…fae.”

“And the gypsies you met when you first came to Castelmore, they’re some sort of human retainers?”

“Not quite human, but essentially, yes, they work for the fae,” Artagnan said, looking frustrated with his inability to explain. Whether that was because he himself didn’t understand it or because he merely lacked the proper vocabulary, Athos couldn’t tell and couldn’t be bothered to ask. There were far more pressing matters.

“And you’ve known this for how long?”

“Three or four months—time here works differently.”

Everything _here_ worked differently, Athos thought with a frustration that mirrored d’Artagnan’s. For example, it felt to him as though they’d been talking for a dog’s age, yet they’d come to no significant conclusions.

“And your”—here, Athos substituted ineffectual words with vague gestures meant to indicate d’Artagnan’s somewhat obvious physical changes—“happened when you arrived here.”

d’Artagnan colored, averting his eyes, and nodded, his face a mask of embarrassed misery.

Athos wanted to hasten to assure d’Artagnan that he was exactly the same man to him as he had always been, but though he would not give up on or repudiate his friend, Athos was not at all sure that d’Artagnan hadn’t changed in even more disturbing and fundamental ways.

“I’m a changeling,” d’Artagnan said for the fourth or fifth time, as though through repetition he could clarify its translation into words that meant something to Athos. But old wives’ tales from the kitchen help when he was a boy didn’t really assist Athos in coming to grips with what was happening to them.

“You were left by,” and here he hesitated over the strange name, “Kayin in the cradle where your parents’ human child slept. You were raised without knowing of your origins. You were lost to the fairies until Arrowman and Ramilda recognized you when you came to Castelmore to tutor Jean-Marie. And marked you with the butterfly, which would identify you once you crossed into this realm.”

He stated all of this factually, as though summarizing the interrogation of a suspected spy, and d’Artagnan stood nearby in the low-ceilinged, dim room that rather anti-climactically had appeared at the bottom of the winding stairs.

In the dim glow of an indeterminate light source, Athos saw that there was a table here, two chairs, a pitcher half-full of stale water, two mugs, and a trunk, the contents of which he hadn’t had the time or inclination to examine. d’Artagnan had called it a “oubliette,” and indeed, from the thick layer of dust on the floor, stirred now by their pacing, it did seem as though the space had been forgotten. How d’Artagnan came to know of it was a mystery for another day.

Now, Athos mostly needed to know, “Why? Why would Kayin kidnap you, cast a _glamour_ , did you call it?” d’Artagnan nodded. “Over you, and then leave you to your fate amongst the humans?”

“The fairy who found me when I came through the portal to the Faire, Raven, said that Kayin, the brother of Queen Serei, was afraid of what she might do should she find that he’d had a son with a human woman. Apparently, there is as much prejudice in this world as in ours about half-bloods. They’d already killed my actual, human mother, and he knew that I was in danger.”

Athos nodded; this part he understood. “You represent a legitimate threat to the queen’s rule, since you are direct in line, and she has been unable to produce an heir.” Court intrigue here was also as predictably treacherous as it was in his world, he had been interested, though not happy, to note.

d’Artagnan nodded.

“And your father is dead?”

d’Artagnan gave a bleak laugh. “I am twice fatherless.”

“If these crea—,” Athos caught himself as d’Artagnan tensed. Any reminder of d’Artagnan’s difference made the young Musketeer flinch. “If your kin are immortal, how is it that Kayin comes to be dead?”

“There are ways they—we—can be killed. If I’m to believe Raven, Queen Serei had my fa—Kayin—ambushed, chained in iron, and then poisoned him with an infusion of wormwood and molten iron. Iron is too human; it kills my— It kills fairies.”

“It’s alright, you know. You can call yourself one of them.”

Athos had intended his words to be comforting, but by the flash of hurt on d’Artagnan’s face, he could tell his intentions had had the opposite effect.

“d’Artagnan—” he began, wanting to reassure him, but d’Artagnan had already crossed the room to the door—the only door—and begun to open it.

“I know you have more questions about me, and I want to answer them, but I need to see about Jean-Marie. The Queen’s punishments can be…” He fumbled for a word.

“Draconian?” Athos suggested drily, taking a stab at it.

A tiny, wry smile tugged at the corner of d’Artagnan’s tense mouth. He ducked his head, which had the effect of causing his lush hair—it had grown longer and thicker since he’d been gone, Athos noted—to part, revealing one delicately pointed ear.

He was struck by that strangeness, of course, but also by the way color climbed into the ear—the way it always had when d’Artagnan was feeling abashed. Athos looked more closely at his young friend and saw there a wholly human emotion, a tenderness of the sort he most often tried to hide from his friends, like when they teased him about Constance Bonacieux.

All at once, it came to him what—or rather who—was making d’Artagnan blush. “You care for Jean-Marie still,” Athos said quietly, changing the tenor if not the degree of tension between them.

d’Artagnan looked stricken, as though Athos had accused him of something unthinkable, and in an anguished voice, he said, “He was my first love.”

A gauntlet of cold iron wrapped itself around Athos’ heart. “I understand.”

“No,” d’Artagnan said, weariness replacing misery in his expression. “You don’t. You _can’t_. But you will. I promise you, Athos, I will _make_ you understand.”

It sounded more threat than promise, and Athos found he had no rejoinder. It was only as the oubliette door closed behind d’Artagnan’s retreating back and the telling snick of the lock being engaged broke the dust-moted silence of the room that Athos realized that he hadn’t been freed at all but merely made a different kind of prisoner.

*****

“Do you hear something?” Aramis asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Besides my stomach growling, d’you mean?” Porthos’ question was one part frustration, two parts indignation. It seemed the fibers binding them were far more resistant to cutting—or the rock far duller than he’d hoped—and they’d been at the effort to free themselves for hours.

“Like a chittering sound?”

Aramis felt Porthos freeze against his back. They’d been taking turns passing the stone between their sweat- and blood-slicked hands, and he’d enjoyed the contact though not the reason for it.

The noise came again, rising and falling in the still, dusk air, like “Two shells being clacked together,” Porthos breathed.

Aramis nodded, mouth suddenly dry. Whatever it was sounded…

“Big,” Porthos added.

 _Damn it_.

*****

Raven came to the door long after Athos had given up trying to find his way through it. Athos had slumped into a dusty chair and was staring with unfocused eyes at the pitcher of water, wondering how desperately thirsty he’d have to be before he tasted it. It was clear from the scum on its surface that it had been there for weeks if not months.

“Do not attempt to escape,” were the guard’s first words, muffled by the dense wood of the door between them.

“Alright,” Athos said wearily. To himself, he muttered, “I’ll do that later, when I’m not so tired.”

Given that he’d spent some portion of the earlier day unconscious, Athos thought that he should be less fatigued, but something about the stale, close air of the room made him drowsy, and he longed for nothing more than a cup of wine to wet his throat and a soft bed to fall into.

The door swung open on silent hinges—someone took care to _keep_ the room forgotten—and Raven appeared carrying a tray in one hand and a bucket in the other. Athos glanced at both objects, pleased to see that the first seemed to contain refreshments of some kind. As the yeasty scent of freshly baked bread washed over him, Athos felt saliva flood his mouth, and his stomach growled audibly to life.

He restrained himself enough not to fall upon the tray like a ravenous wolf when Raven set it on the table before him, but only just.

“Will you join me?” he asked.

Raven shook his head.

“Not even for a cup of this excellent wine?” Athos had unstoppered the bottle and taken a deep sniff of its delicate bouquet.

Raven shook his head again.

“Then, will you at least sit with me while I eat?”

He wanted to see what he could learn from the guard, but he was also loth to be alone again, especially with that bottle of wine. Getting drunk seemed an extraordinarily unwise thing to do in these circumstances, but Athos was man enough to admit that he didn’t always have total control over his baser impulses.

“I cannot,” Raven said in a voice devoid of inflection. But he leaned back against the closed door and crossed his arms.

 _He’s waiting to take back these things_ , Athos realized. Bottle, cup, butter knife, even the heavy wooden tray—potential weapons all.

The bucket was apparently considered safe, for Raven had stowed it in the dimmest corner of the room, though given the room’s limited perimeter, there’d be no escaping the eventual stench. Athos tried not to think about being trapped there that long.

A carefully folded linen revealed a loaf of fine bread, already split and buttered, and a second wrapping proved to conceal a round of some pungent, sharp cheese. There was a pottery bowl full of a thick, meaty stew—as an experienced campaigner, he had long ago learned to never question where the meat came from—and even a delicate white plate upon which someone had lovingly arranged candied, apple-like fruit.

The wine was as good as its scent had promised, and soon enough, Athos was feeling less tired and more alert than before.

“Your wine has a wonderful restorative power,” he noted. He was rewarded with the minutest shift in the stoic guard’s expression—agreement, Athos thought, though he couldn’t be sure.

“Tell me, have you served Queen Serei for long?”

Raven regarded Athos for a moment and then seemed to arrive at some concession with his training, for he unbent enough to answer. “Time is different for us here, but I believe you would say twice two hundred years.”

“That is a long time to remain loyal to a monarch,” Athos said, considering what it would be like if, God help them, Louis were to be suddenly granted immortality. Some of the horror of the thought must have translated to his tone because Raven’s lip quirked up in a suggestion of a smirk.

“It is a long time,” he agreed, words noncommittal but tone a little more definite.

 _Ah-ha!_ Athos thought. _Queen Serei is feared but not universally liked._

“And how is it that you come now to serve d’Art—Cainson?” Athos disliked d’Artagnan’s fairy name: It drove home in yet another way that there was a distance now between them that hadn’t existed before.

“d’Artagnan’s father was my friend,” Raven explained. “And I owed him a debt.” Raven seemed to use d’Artagnan’s human name deliberately; Athos wondered if it was to maintain a distance or for some other, more personal reason.

“Because you failed to protect Kayin from the queen?” Athos took a stab in the dark, sensing an undercurrent in Raven’s words.

“Because it was I who followed my lady’s orders and led him to his doom,” Raven answered. Nothing about his stony face gave away Raven’s feeling about having betrayed a friend, but Athos could detect a tension across his shoulders and a ticking in the muscle of his jaw that belied the guard’s terse, unfeeling declaration.

Athos narrowed his eyes, assessing. “Why would you tell me this?” It seemed an unlikely confession even among friends, and they were virtual—and largely antipathetic—strangers.

“d’Artagnan clearly cares for you, and you are doomed if you do not soon learn that the rules of your world do not apply to this one. I would not see him harmed by your ignorance.”

“So you offer me advice out of concern for d’Artagnan.”

Raven jerked his head in what might have been a nod. His folded arms tensed as he pushed himself upright and moved toward the table.

Athos hurriedly arranged the remains of his meal on the tray, and Raven picked it up, indicating the bucket with his chin: “I’ll take that in the morning.”

“It must be a great debt indeed if you’re going to carry my piss and shit.”

He was baiting Raven, it was true. Suddenly sick of it all—the tiny prison, the half-truths and misdirection, the inability to know even what time of day it was—he craved some reaction that he could grapple with.

He got it.

With a clatter, the tray struck the table, and then Raven was lifting Athos by the throat and shoving him hard against the wall. Athos felt the by now familiar sensation of his toes scraping the floor and his wind being cut off, and he choked out a gasping laugh, smirking in the fairy’s angry face.

“d’Artagnan’s power is a gentler art than my own,” Raven observed, pressing his powerful body against Athos to pin him in place and removing his hand from his throat. “Where those in his line seduce, I destroy by more direct methods.” He brought his hands up to cradle Athos’ temples, and he thought the fairy was going to kiss him, belying his assertion that seduction was not his intent.

Then the thumbs that rested against his brow began to press against his eyelids, and Athos understood at once that he had gravely miscalculated. The pressure grew rapidly to pain, and panic shot an adrenaline bolt through him. He began flailing uselessly at the fairy’s arms and flanks.

Raven might have been made of stone for all that he seemed to feel Athos’ blows.

“I would take your eyes to remind you of your foolishness, but d’Artagnan would object, and I still owe him a debt.”

All at once, Raven released Athos, and Athos staggered, eyes blurred with pain tears, black spots the size of thumbprints blocking his sight. His knees felt weak, and he was grateful for the wall at his back to hold him up.

“But understand, human, that beyond my debt to d’Artagnan, you are nothing to me.”

“And yet,” Athos wheezed, unable or unwilling to help himself, “you will clean up after me because of the debt. Surely, there is something here that matters to you.”

But Raven was done with him for the time being, it seemed. He retrieved the tray and arranged the items that had scattered at his dropping it, turned on a booted heel, and left the room without so much as glancing again at Athos. The dull click of the lock being driven to on the other side of the door reminded Athos that his condition had not changed at all: He was a prisoner, as much in d’Artagnan’s control as Raven apparently was, and for all that he thought he could claim bonds of affection and friendship rather than mere obligation, he wasn’t sure.

If Raven could be complicit in the death of his friend, what could Athos expect from his own?

*****

There were many occasions on which Aramis had enjoyed being naked and crushed against Porthos’ equally naked body, but this was not one of them.

No sooner had they freed themselves of their bonds and attempted to take cover from whatever was making that spine-chilling sound than the whatever itself—or rather, _them_ selves—appeared at the edge of the clearing and surrounded the two Musketeers.

He’d caught a look at them—pale green skin, pointed ears and pointier teeth, half as tall as he, and armed with war clubs and nets—before they’d swarmed ahead with breath-stealing speed and captured them with Aramis’ sword half out of its scabbard and Porthos caught mid-roar.

They’d been efficiently stripped, their compliance guaranteed by the slender menace of crudely made but lethally sharp knives, and bound together, hands behind their backs but stomach-to-stomach.

The jostling of the cart upon which they’d been unceremoniously hoisted ground Porthos’ hip rather uncomfortably into his soft bits, but Aramis just clenched his teeth and took it, loth to make a sound after the last observation he’d made—a casual little remark about the creatures’ shocking lack of hospitality—had earned him a cuff to the head that had deafened him temporarily in one ear and made the other ring obnoxiously.

“Sorry,” Porthos breathed into his ear, and Aramis mouthed, “I’m fine,” against his lover’s sweaty neck.

“Better ‘n that,” Porthos flirted, ever the one for inappropriately timed innuendo.

As a reward, Aramis licked a stripe along the muscles of his throat, earning a stifled groan for his effort.

“Stop that,” Porthos murmured, though he didn’t sound like he meant it.

One of their captors made a guttural, abrupt barking sound, which Aramis only belatedly recognized as speech when a second creature answered it, and the wagon jounced to a halt, throwing Porthos harder against Aramis. This time, he couldn’t stop a pained sound from escaping him when Porthos’ hip caught him sharply in the tenderest region, and he braced himself to be struck again.

Instead, they were bundled roughly out of the cart, propped upon their unsteady legs, and forced in an awkward sidling side-step toward what seemed to be the center of a sprawling, primitively built village.

The houses were circular, with curved windows and low, narrow doors. They appeared to be made out of wattle reinforced by layers of neatly daubed clay. Many had been washed in pale colors: sun-faded blues, tinges of rose and ochre, here and there a suggestion of green and watery brown. He realized as they moved closer to the town center that what had appeared a random arrangement was actually a careful spiral plan, with streets turning inward toward the heart of the community, a round green space in which there stood a high wooden platform.

Ominously, one end of the platform was dominated by a whipping post and gallows. At the other end was a dais, upon which sat a massive but plain wooden throne, ranged about which were more of the creatures, these armed with pikes. On the throne itself was a wizened grey creature with lank, long grey hair and eyes the color of poison toadstools.

Because most of the creatures were topless, Aramis could see that this one sported withered dugs that hung halfway to her shriveled navel. Around her waist was fastened a skirt that seemed to be made of supple leather, and on her head was a coronet of woven vines, at the center of which was a sprig of nightshade, its red berries like blood drops against her fish-belly white forehead.

While Aramis had been taking this survey, a crowd of restless, muttering creatures had ringed them, pressing the Musketeers toward the platform. Just as he considered the wisdom of asking for their help in getting up the stairs—there was no way to negotiate it bound together as they were—Aramis heard another series of guttural barks, and he felt the rope binding them together loosen.

Hands still bound but free now to stand shoulder to shoulder and face this latest danger, Aramis and Porthos climbed the short flight of stairs to the platform.

Pike staves at their shoulders asserted pressure, urging them to kneel, but Aramis shook his head.

“We kneel to one queen only, and as lovely as you are,” Aramis charmed, “You are not she, lady.”

He had no idea if they spoke his language, and he had a reasonable expectation of the sharp blade of the pike taking his head off at the neck for his insolence, so Aramis was surprised when the creature on the throne began a throaty wheezing that he realized after a moment was her version of laughter.

“You find me pleasing to look upon, human?” she asked eventually, waving a hand to dismiss the guards back to their flanking positions, leaving Aramis and Porthos with their heads still firmly attached to their bodies.

“I am always attracted to a lady with power,” he equivocated, putting on the smile that had launched a hundred affairs du coeur.

Her eyes narrowed, and Aramis wondered if he’d pushed his luck. Then her lower face turned up in a hideous grimace that he recognized as a smile when she said, “You lie well.”

It was not a condemnation.

She considered them. “You are pretty enough to be allied with our treacherous brethren, but if you were bound by their laws, you could not tell even this much of an untruth. You’re also too inept to be spies. Only fools and children would be captured so easily by the little ones.”

Though her words were heavily accented, stresses falling on the wrong syllables, Aramis did not think that she was speaking of her own people in such diminutive terms. So it hadn’t been they who had trussed the Musketeers up originally.

How many horrors did this strange world harbor?

“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage, my lady. Porthos and I, Aramis, are new to this land. We do not know any of those of whom you speak.”

“You claim no alliance in the Faire, then?”

Something about the eagerness of the question warned Aramis that his answer was vital to their continued survival, and he spared a glance for Porthos, who had until now been content to listen and observe.

“We are travelers, lady,” Porthos said then. “Seeking our friends, who have been lost to us in this land.”

Again her eyes narrowed. “You claim the rights of the Travelers?”

“Aye,” Porthos answered for them both. Aramis felt a frisson of unease crawl up his spine, but he said nothing, watching the queen as she calculated the potential benefit or cost of taking them at their word.

“You do bear something of the look of them,” she mused, and Aramis considered her earlier words. _The_ travelers, she’d said, as if referring to a specific and known group. Damn.

“Let us say that I agree to abide by the terms of the treaty and let you go. How do you plan to find your friends? I assure you that they are not among my people, and you’ve already proven you can’t handle yourself amongst the little ones, never mind the fairer brethren. For Travelers, you are woefully incompetent.”

Porthos shifted beside him, but Aramis spoke up before his friend could express his feelings about being insulted.

“We were unprepared for a quest of this nature and did not know we’d be sojourning here. Perhaps you’d be willing to lend us a guide?”

Her gaze sharpened, something greedy in the depths of her predatory eyes: “You ask a boon of me, then?”

Porthos said, “No,” hastily, giving Aramis a warning look.

“Surely I heard you ask a boon.”

To either side, her guards spoke up in concurrence, an affirmative noise that rippled down from the platform and throughout the gathered crowd.

“Would you be foresworn?”

Aramis sensed the danger in her question. “No, of course not. What Porthos meant to say is that we do not wish to inconvenience you, my fine lady.”

“A bargain means both sides prosper,” she noted shrewdly, gesturing toward a group of creatures standing a little apart from the rest of the crowd below. One of them, taller than the rest and with finer features and blunter teeth, climbed the stairs and crossed the platform with a measured tread.

She had a longer face and larger eyes than the creatures around her and fair hair spilling down her long back. Unlike the rest of her people, she was fully clothed, wearing a shift and leather tunic with supple leather pants and boots that covered her to her knee.

Also unlike her compatriots, she carried not a pike or knife but an elegant, slender bow and a quiver of arrows fletched with bright feathers.

“Hear this, my people: The Travelers Aramis and Porthos are protected by the terms of our treaty with our fair and little brethren. They may move freely within our lands so long as they do not offer harm to any of you or yours. To do them harm will bring upon you great suffering. Let them be recognized and welcomed.”

At a gesture from his queen, one of the attending guards unbound the Musketeers’ hands.

Then, the fair creature stepped forward to receive orders from the queen.

“Arielda, you will guide these Travelers on their quest to seek their lost friends. You are responsible for their well-being and must ensure that no harm comes to them if it is within your power to prevent it. They owe us a boon, and I would collect what I’m owed.”

Arielda bowed her head stiffly from the neck, murmured, “Yes, Queen Maven,” and turned with a wooden expression toward Aramis and Porthos. “Come with me.”

Before obeying their new guide, Aramis made a flourishing courtesy, which Porthos mimicked with less grace but no less sincere gratitude. They were both grateful to be escaping this ugly throng with their lives.

As they followed Arielda off the platform, Aramis murmured, “May we know where you are taking us?”

The creature paused and turned around, taking a long, deliberate moment to drag her gaze up their naked bodies from their feet to, at last, their faces.

“I know not what is traditional in your realm, but here, we do not go on questing journeys without the protection of clothes.” Aramis noticed that her command of their language was smoother and more adept than the queen’s.

“Right you are, my lady.”

She stiffened and shook her head, a short, sharp motion. “That title is reserved only for nobility. You may call me Arielda when you must gain my attention, though I would prefer it that you speak as little as possible.”

Suiting action to words, she turned without any further conversation and led them through the parting crowd toward one of the outer arms of the spiraled streets, into what was clearly a business district of sorts.

Here, the buildings were larger and grander, and wooden signs painted with illustrations advertised what each shop offered to potential buyers.

“We had coin with us when we came,” Aramis began, but Arielda waved him to silence.

“And swords and pistols,” Porthos added, voice gruff with insistence.

She gave them an annoyed look. “I am taking you to the armorer, where your weapons were brought when you were led here. She will have looked after them in the event that you were freed or smelted them down for the metal had you been executed instead.”

Aramis thought he heard a note of wistfulness in the latter option and decided to avoid upsetting their guide unduly.

Inside the cramped space—Porthos had to bend at the waist to avoid brushing the ceiling with his shoulders, and Aramis had to hold his head at an odd angle to keep from knocking it against the curved roof beams overhead—they found a hunch-backed, pock-faced female of indeterminate age who thrust their sheathed weapons at them and muttered something to Arielda in their own tongue.

Arielda indicated that they should follow her, and so naked they went. Aramis began to suspect that Arielda was leading them the long way on purpose, parading them in their nakedness through every street in the village before at last arriving at a small, humble hut set somewhat apart from the others.

“Your clothes and swords are inside. Your pistols won’t work here, so the armorer will keep them.”

They thought to object, but she plowed right on, “Get dressed. I’m going to see about supplies. Don’t leave here. Don’t speak to anyone unless you’re spoken to or summoned by the queen. Am I clear?”

Aramis was tempted to offer a mock-salute, but he settled for a terse nod before ducking into the hut, where he found their clothes, still wet from the swamp in which they’d first regained consciousness and none the better for having been dumped in a pile on the dirt floor.

Still, damp and smelly was better than nothing at all, and he gingerly climbed into his smalls, grimacing at the clammy way they clung to his nether parts. Porthos grunted as he struggled into his sticky trousers, and they exchanged relieved smiles as they buckled on their swords, which had been left with their other things.

The nature of the smile changed as they realized they were alone for perhaps the last time in a long while, and, ducking to avoid braining themselves, they met with desperate haste. It was awkward—Aramis could feel the muscles of his neck protesting at the angle—but glorious, and when they at last pulled away from one another, they were equally breathless and flushed.

“Do you think we’ll get out of this one?” Porthos asked, acknowledging the undercurrent of treachery that Aramis himself had been experiencing since the queen had first addressed them.

Aramis took in the ridiculous stoop Porthos had to adopt to fit in the space, noted his face still hot from their earlier grappling, and considered the long smear of muck on his tunic. Certainly, they’d seen better days, but they’d also survived much worse.

“I think these people don’t know what they’ve let themselves in for,” Aramis answered, grinning.

“Aye,” Porthos answered, grinning back. “That sounds about right.”

*****

Athos was ready for d’Artagnan when he finally reappeared. Actually, he hadn’t known it was his friend, only that someone was coming to at last relieve him of the desperate tension of waiting. He was in such a state that he no longer cared if he were killed, so long as he no longer had to inhabit that musty, dim little room.

So when d’Artagnan opened the door and took a hasty step into the room, saying, “I haven’t much time, but I have to tell you—” Athos didn’t bother to listen. From behind the half-open door, he moved with such swiftness that d’Artagnan had no time to react. Athos gripped his friend by his finely embroidered lapels and shoved him with terrific force in the direction of the far wall.

As that wall was a mere six feet away, d’Artagnan struck it with a resounding thud and slid down to the trunk, where he landed in a sprawl, apparently stunned.

Athos was on him, bid for freedom forgotten in a sudden frenzy of mingled anger and despair. This was his friend, the young man who had looked to him for guidance and support, who had pledged his loyalty to their common cause, yet he’d locked Athos in like an animal, to be caged and forgotten, visited only when it suited the other.

“I’m not your pet!” Athos growled between clenched teeth, driving a knee into the space between d’Artagnan’s legs and pinning him to the wall by his shoulders. He nudged, none too gently, at d’Artagnan’s tenderest parts and glowered down at him. “You think scraps and occasional kindness will keep me tame?”

“Please,” d’Artagnan gasped, face paling, eyes growing round with fear or astonishment or both. “I didn’t mean—”

“Your intentions mean very little when your actions speak so clearly.” Athos did not ease the pressure, and d’Artagnan began to sweat, like beads of light breaking out across his forehead.

Face twisted with pain and horror, features disfigured from their human shape, d’Artagnan bore no resemblance to the man Athos had known, and he was tempted to shift his grip to the thing’s throat and squeeze the life out of him before making his escape.

“Please,” d’Artagnan choked out against tears—whether from pain or remorse, Athos didn’t know and couldn’t care. “Athos, I am your friend. You have to believe me.”

“I don’t have to do anything you say,” Athos answered, not relaxing the pressure on d’Artagnan’s groin nor relenting in the force he used to pin him by the shoulders.

“They would have killed you,” d’Artagnan cried, words strangled by his obvious discomfort.

“Perhaps you should have let them.” Athos’ voice was calm and low, a deceptive quiet that hid a depth of fury beneath a smooth, unruffled surface. He had once believed he was immune to betrayal, having suffered the worst of it; he was wrong. The agent of that pain had been struggling beneath him, but at Athos’ declaration, d’Artagnan had gone still.

“You don’t mean that.” d’Artagnan seemed shattered, undone by Athos’ words and by the way in which he delivered them: measured and in deadly earnest.

Athos sneered but said nothing. d’Artagnan’s sentiment seemed gauche at best, treacherously disingenuous at worst.

“Please, Athos, let me explain, let me—.”

“I thought you were in a hurry.” His cultured voice ladled dripping scorn over every syllable.

“I’ll stay,” d’Artagnan hastened to say, the light of hope creeping into his strained expression.

“And?” Athos coaxed, eyes hard on d’Artagnan.

“I’ll leave the door open.”

“And?” His steely resolve was unmistakable: He would be free of this cursed room!

“I can’t,” d’Artagnan cried. The anguish on his face seemed genuine, and something stirred in the burning furnace of Athos’ fury.

At once, he was sick of it all—of the politics and the lies and the complete otherness of this alien place and these infuriating creatures. He wanted nothing more than to be back in the courtyard of the barracks, sweating and filthy after a long day’s training, swallowing cold water that tasted of the bucket from which it came, his friends around him and nothing on the horizon but the setting sun.

Athos released d’Artagnan with an abrupt motion, pushing himself off of the trunk and moving across to the open door.

“I’ve a mind to leave you in here and take my chances out there.”

d’Artagnan, who had not even righted himself on the trunk, shook his head drunkenly against the wall, a mute testimony of his fear.

“Exactly what is it you’re most afraid of, d’Artagnan? That I’ll be caught? Killed? Or is it that you are responsible for me, and if I cause trouble, it’s your head that rolls?”

“I’m afraid you’ll leave me,” d’Artagnan answered after a taut, singing silence.

“Leave you?” Athos answer burst from him, half laugh, half shout. “I’m not—we’re not…are we?” The intention of d’Artagnan’s words met with his expression in that moment and the weight of his meaning crashed over Athos, crushing the breath from him and making him stagger a little in seeking the chair nearest the door.

He sank into the seat, stared unseeing at the bucket half-full of now-stale water. He shook his head against the enormity of truth that threatened to overwhelm him. Surely a few fantasies and a healthy appreciation for d’Artagnan’s physical beauty didn’t a relationship make. They hadn’t even touched with intent, not really.

(He ignored the niggling voice that wormed its way into his brain and brought up the memory of the discussion he and d’Artagnan had had in their rooms at Castelmore, the heat in d’Artagnan’s eyes as he’d watched Athos watching him, and the dream that had followed, erotic and terrifying.)

Athos’ stunned speechlessness had apparently been taken for denial because d’Artagnan blustered, in a voice strained with false heartiness, “Leave me _here_ , I mean, among the fair folk. I want to return to our world. I want things to go back to the way they were before.”

Once again, Athos found himself reflecting on d’Artagnan’s innocence: Touching or dangerous? Enviable or foolish? He wasn’t sure of anything anymore except that he wanted to get out of that room.

“Of course that’s what you meant,” Athos said smoothly, recovering his aplomb long before d’Artagnan was likely to do. “I was only wondering about your…degree of earnestness.”

d’Artagnan paused in the process of righting himself. “You doubt my sincerity?”

Athos shrugged, held his hands, palms-up, just above the tabletop in a gesture that mimicked befuddlement. His words when they came, however, were laced with an incisive irony calculated to wound.

“Here, you’re a princeling awaiting his chance to rule. There, you are but a probationer, not guaranteed even the lowest position among the King’s Musketeers. Here, you are wealthy; there, poor. Here, you can resume your relationship with your tragic, lost love. There, you and he are separated by insurmountable circumstances. Here, no one cares that you love another of your own sex, apparently. There, well…”

Another shrug, insouciant and rude.

“I know what you’re doing,” d’Artagnan said, having at last risen from the trunk and made his way to the chair across the table from Athos. “And it won’t work. You can’t make me mad. You can’t drive me to denounce you and send you away. I’ve already told you what I want. I intend to have it.”

Here again, in manner and voice, was the pigheaded, stalwart Gascon with whom Athos was so familiar. It made him ache to hear the boy’s certainty, his confident foolhardiness.

It was all a sham.

“You can’t have what you want, d’Artagnan,” Athos replied wearily. “This world is not ruled by the same laws as your former world was—as _my_ world is.” He emphasized the difference deliberately, waiting to see understanding pull the light of hope from d’Artagnan’s face.

“The sooner you recognize that, the better you’ll be. You can’t bluster and hack your way to a solution here. You’ll be torn to pieces, probably literally. And it will be the ones you trusted most who do it.”

“You don’t understand, Athos. You haven’t been here that long, and—”

Athos shook his head. He didn’t need to have been exposed to this court any longer than he had to know all that he needed to about it.

“Are you familiar with the story of Kayin and Raven?”

d’Artagnan’s expression of shock was gratifying; Athos was tired of being the surprised one.

“Best friends, weren’t they? Brothers in arms. Centuries of comradeship between them. But Raven betrayed that friendship at the behest of his queen. He led his best friend to slaughter without hesitation. Do you really think that you rate any loyalty from Raven and the rest? They don’t care about you, d’Artagnan. You’re nothing but a pawn to them. They humor your position now because it suits them, but as soon as you’ve served whatever purpose they have for you, you’re done.”

“They want me to be king,” d’Artagnan said in a low, careful voice, as though even in this forgotten room they might be overheard.

“Is that what Raven told you?”

d’Artagnan nodded. “Queen Serei has had several husbands, none of whom were successful in getting her with child. By the treaty the fairies made with the other peoples of this realm, the one who sits on the throne of the Faire can do so only so long as he or she has a blood heir. Should the fairies fail to produce said heir, there will be a contest between the peoples for the throne of the realm. Serei is in the last year of her reign, and she is desperate to keep the throne.”

“So she’ll overlook your…less-than-pure lineage…for political reasons?”

d’Artagnan flushed. “She doesn’t want a half-human ruling the Faire, but what else can she do? There’s little chance she’ll get with child between now and the end of term noted in the treaty.”

“There are no others who have legitimate claim to the throne through her line?”

d’Artagnan shook his head. “None that she knows of.”

“But?”

“There is a powerful faction that disagreed with the treaty when it was signed five hundred years ago and who do not wish for me to claim the throne. They want a war. They believe that the fairies are the only true rulers of the realm, that the other peoples have no legitimate claim, and that the treaty was a shameful blotch on their otherwise untarnished history as the ruling people.”

Perhaps, reflected Athos, the fairy folk weren’t so different from the human kind after all.

“This faction is trying to stop you, I take it?”

“Yes,” d’Artagnan said. “Which is why I’ve been keeping you here. Jean-Marie is more or less safe, as he has been in custody of the queen, and even those in the faction who oppose her are not foolish enough to attack a guest of the realm right under her nose. But you—.”

“I’m vulnerable.”

d’Artagnan nodded and then, taking a deep breath, added, his voice a study in misery, “There’s something else.”

Of course there was. Athos made a _Go on_ gesture with his hand.

“This faction has insisted that I cannot claim the throne if I have not proven my…fecundity.”

Athos quirked an eyebrow in his direction. “You have to get someone with child?”

d’Artagnan gave an odd head-bob, not quite a nod, his face a portrait of mortified anguish.

“I take it you don’t feel…up…to the challenge.” He couldn’t resist the pun. He’d suffered too long in the oubliette to let d’Artagnan go unpunished.

d’Artagnan blushed a deep crimson. “It’s not that I can’t…perform. In this realm, I can marry either sex and produce an heir.” (Athos’ eyebrow shot into his hairline, but he didn’t interrupt.) “It’s that…I can lie only with a mate who has proven his worthiness.”

These last words were said all in a rush, so that it took Athos a long moment to translate them. When he had, he stared at d’Artagnan for another interminable moment, trying to suss out what his most useful response might be.

He had none.

d’Artagnan nodded again, as if he’d recognized Athos’ silence for what it was. “They’ve ordered a suitors’ challenge, to begin tomorrow, for any who wish to lay claim to my...bed.” He choked a little on the last word and shook his head helplessly.

“I’d imagine you have a long line of ‘suitors’?” Athos asked, adopting a flirtatious tone for the question, hoping to lighten the moment, but his question seemed to have the opposite effect.

“Only two,” he whispered, and Athos had to lean forward to hear him at all. “Jean-Marie and Raven.”

Neither name surprised Athos, though he was surprised to learn that there were no other suitors.

“What my father did when he lay with my mother—that’s considered a kind of perversion, like lying with animals in our world. There are very few who would consider marrying me, even with my potential kingship.”

Athos understood. “Raven’s doing it out of obligation. He owes a debt to your father.”

d’Artagnan nodded.

“Jean-Marie is doing it because he loves you,” Athos noted quietly.

For the first time in several minutes, d’Artagnan met his eyes. “He does. And it’s going to get him killed.”

“You think Raven intends to be your, uh, spouse?”

d’Artagnan shrugged. “I think Jean-Marie is a soft target regardless.”

“So why have you really hidden me in this little room of forgetting, d’Artagnan?”

Athos felt that they had been building to this question all along.

d’Artagnan’s face turned a darker red, but he did not look away as he said, “I wanted to keep you safe so that you could join the challenge.”

*****

“So, er, not to be rude or anything, but who _are_ you, exactly?” It was an uncharacteristically politic question for Porthos, but even so, his real meaning was clear. He wanted to know _what_ Arielda was.

“I am Arielda, third guard rank, of Stoneton.”

“I believe what my comrade wondered was from what people do you descend?” Ever the courtier, Aramis’ voice dripped with supplicating condescension. Over the years, many women—and not a few men—had given way before that particular note of entitled begging.

Arielda remained stubbornly immune, damn her. “My mother’s name is none of your business. My father was Kayin.”

“What an unusual name,” Aramis said. It was the sort of leading observation that had worked in the past to eke information out of persons of interest.

Arielda ignored him. Aramis took a breath to try again when Porthos, on a long exhalation of frustrated air, said, “Look, what we want to know is what are you people?”

Aramis winced. Arielda had already proven her touchiness. Aramis didn’t relish an arrow through the eye.

He braced himself as their guide pivoted tightly on one heel. He drew a few inches of steel as quietly as he could.

Not quietly enough. Arielda pinned him with a sharp look, and he froze. Meanwhile, Porthos was standing in a posture of submission, hands at his sides, palms out: _No threat here_.

"That is a very rude question,” she said, bristling but apparently mollified by Porthos’ obvious confusion.

Porthos shrugged good-naturedly. “We’re not from around here.”

“And do you usually ask strangers what they are when you meet them where you come from?”

Porthos shrugged again. “Sometimes.”

Arielda snorted, an inelegant, unladylike sound that managed to convey both her disgust at their ignorance and her sense of moral superiority.

"My mother was goblin-kind, my father one of the Fair.”

“Fair?”

“You’d say…fairy?”

“Your father was a fairy?” Porthos’ disbelief was unflattering, and Arielda’s expression darkened.

“In our world, your father’s kind—well, to be quite truthful, your kind, and your mother’s, and, well, everyone we’ve met here…you’re all just…” Aramis’ legendary savoir faire abandoned him as he struggled to put it in less insulting terms.

“You’re children’s tales,” Porthos said in his typical blunt fashion.

To Aramis’ eternal astonishment, Arielda’s face cleared and she nodded her head decisively.

“That’s as we intend it. We hardly want you animals tromping through the Faire, stinking up the place for the rest of us, do we?”

Her disdain was palpable. Aramis had to resist the urge to sniff under his arm. He was sure after a day and night of captivity and the ravages of the swamp, their clothes and bodies had to be pretty rank.

But as for animals…

“But you do come among us now and again, do you not?” Aramis was thinking of his grandmere’s stories of changelings, of fairy lights over the fen and the sounds of ghostly laughter rippling from the secret veils of night-dark willows.

Arielda’s lip curled. “Our young sometimes enter your world on a dare. They enjoy tormenting you.” She said it as though she were talking about a boy pulling wings off of flies.

“And the lost children?”

Something like pain struck her face and glanced off. When he looked again, it was an impassive mask.

“Move along. We have enough daylight yet to make it to the border of the Faire.”

“The Faire?”

“The realm of the Fair.”

“Ah. And what of these little folk of which your queen spoke?”

“You’d better hope we don’t encounter them,” was all the answer he got. Then he was staring at her back, moving resolutely away through the fringes of the vast marsh they’d been crossing for hours already.

“Can’t say I think much of their hospitality,” Aramis murmured.

“But at least they’re prickly,” Porthos agreed, offering a piratical grin.

Aramis returned the look and fell in beside Porthos, allowing himself now and then the comfort of their shoulders brushing at the narrow places in the path.

*****

“You want me to declare my intention to _marry_ you?” Though it was the third time Athos had asked some version of the same question, he sounded no less flabbergasted than on the two previous occasions.

It wasn’t that the proposition lacked in its attractions—though there was that pesky little problem of bigamy to work around—but that Athos couldn’t quite work out how they’d gone from a few lingering glances and flirtatious remarks to “until death do you part.”

d’Artagnan ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “It’s to keep you safe,” he reiterated. “If you’re a suitor, you’re a recognized guest of the court. You cannot be harmed except during the contest.”

Athos leveled a steady, assessing gaze on d’Artagnan. The young man’s face was flushed, the tips of his pointed ears aflame with embarrassment…or something else. He considered the way d’Artagnan’s breath came faster, the way his lips parted ever so slightly as he awaited Athos’ ultimate answer.

“And that’s the _only_ reason?”

d’Artagnan’s eyes widened a fraction and his mouth closed, but he gave no other indication that Athos’ question discomforted him. He shook his head. “What other reason might I have?”

Athos watched his Adam’s apple bob in a nervous swallow and had to swallow his own reaction, an inappropriate smile that would have given his game away.

“Something to do with a butterfly?” Athos acknowledged the elephant in the room, and far from withdrawing, d’Artagnan seemed to exhale with relief at the question.

“You saw what happened when…”

“When I touched you. Yes. Hard not to, what with you fainting like a fragile girl right after.”

He wasn’t even a little sorry to see d’Artagnan blush.

“They told me when I arrived here that Ramilda had marked me for them so that I could safely travel to the Faire. They thought it was just a pass, of sorts. But after you touched it, and I fai—fell unconscious—they realized she had woven something else into the ink.”

Here, d’Artagnan’s vaunted Gascon courage seemed to fail him, and he stammered to a halt, blushing furiously and staring hard at the table, the walls—anything but at Athos, who felt foreboding growing in his belly as the silence stretched between them.

In the cold, unwavering tone he often used when facing sure death, Athos said, “What else did the butterfly signify, d’Artganan?”

At last, with what was clearly a physical effort, d’Artagnan met Athos’ eyes. “A true-love knot. Only my true love could break the spell and free the butterfly.”

That is not what Athos had expected to hear, but after a few moments’ struggle to come to terms with it, he found the notion not entirely displeasing.

That, alone, ought to have terrified him. He was done with being enthralled by attraction and the jealous beast that called itself love.

“Of course,” Athos said after considering and discarding several possible responses, “We don’t believe in such nonsense in our world.”

It was a tenuous straw, but d’Artagnan grasped at it desperately, his raw gratitude almost embarrassing to witness.

“Right,” d’Artagnan answered, too quickly. “It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

They might have left it there, each of them content to go back to pretending they were simply friends and fellow Musketeers. But they had both heard the weakness of d’Artagnan’s protest, and Athos didn’t miss the shadow of disappointment that crossed d’Artagnan’s face, either.

If he was being honest with himself, which he avoided whenever he could—and when he couldn’t, he put a bottle in truth’s way—Athos could admit to a certain disappointment as well.

“But it might,” Athos said slowly, ignoring the way the very prospect of such a commitment drove a spike of icy fear through his guts.

d’Artagnan cured that chill by lunging at him, grabbing him by the shoulders, and hauling him across the scant inches separating them to lay a searing kiss on his mouth, which was half-open with astonishment.

He barely had time to register that he was being kissed, never mind determine how good it felt to have d’Artagnan touching him like that, before d’Artagnan had pulled away, stumbling backward toward the door, the back of one hand across his mouth like some ridiculous heroine in a courtly romance.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” d’Artagnan whispered, face paling, horror clouding his beautiful eyes.

“No,” Athos agreed. “You shouldn’t have.”

dArtagnan’s horror was replaced by abject mortification, which was, in turn, masked by a wooden neutrality that made Athos regret all of his teasing.

“Because,” he added, his voice going low as he let his hunger into it. “We don’t have the time now to follow it through to its logical—and _much desired_ —conclusion.”

As his words took hold of d’Artagnan’s imagination, he blushed again, a very…compelling…color rising to his ear tips, and a grin broke out across his face that had as much of the delighted child as the lascivious soldier in it.

It did things to Athos’ insides that were better left unexamined for the time being. They were, after all, in mortal peril, the both of them, and needed to come up with a strategy that would ensure Athos winning the contest, if only to keep d’Artagnan from having to marry Raven.

Or Jean-Marie.

Athos found the latter prospect far more disquieting, but now was neither the time nor was this the place to pay heed to those particular feelings. Instead, he raised an eyebrow and a hand and gestured toward the door.

“Shall we? You can tell me on the way what words I should use to declare my intentions of winning your hand, fair maiden.”

Athos’ tone was just the right combination of teasing and seductive. d’Artagnan colored again, ducked his chin in an alarmingly attractive gesture of shyness, and led the way up the stairs and out of the little room where at least one thing would not be forgotten, not by either of the two now escaping it.

*****

On occasion, Aramis had had reason to consider how his inclinations often led him to ridiculous situations. Crouched beneath the skirts of a lady’s dresses in her armoire while her husband seduced her to squealing in a bed not two yards away was a good example.

Crawling on his belly beneath the lowest branches of an evergreen, hoping to stay clear of the tiny darts raining fire onto every area of exposed skin was worse. Sans gloves and hat, his hands and the back of his neck were suffering the brunt of the attack of “pixies,” he believed Arielda had cried, just before she’d dived for cover beneath an evergreen across the clearing from his own.

He ducked as the ominous buzz of wings signaled a concentration of the creatures in the branches over his head. Their tiny voices, like the sound a swarm of gnats would make and equally unintelligible, alerted him to imminent pain, and he winced and closed his eyes, anticipating a renewal of the stinging missiles.

He was surely imagining the twang of a dozen miniscule bow-strings, but the bloom of needles growing from the back of his right hand and the rivulet of blood making its way down the back of his shirt, these things weren’t imaginary.

“A little help, here!” he shouted to Arielda, who had disappeared around the wide base of her chosen shelter.

She responded in her own language, and he was about to point out the uselessness of her attempt when there was a sudden cessation of arrows and the battalion of flying annoyances buzzed away into the clearing, to meet with the rest of their fellows for what seemed to be a conclave of a sort.

Arielda appeared from behind her tree and gestured for him and Porthos to get up and join her in the clearing.

He was loth to break cover, but as Porthos was already making his awkward way from beneath a neighboring tree, Aramis figured he must also be brave.

Pulling the darts from his hands and neck as he approached, Aramis spared a look for Porthos, who seemed to be suffering only the same indignity and no more serious harm.

Then he had eyes only for the creature that hovered at eye-level and six feet away from Arielda, who was standing with her hands loose at her sides, bow and quiver on her back, making clear her intention to parley.

The creature was perhaps the length of Porthos’ hand and bore a considerable resemblance to the goblins they’d seen in the village: Long, narrow face, pointed ears and sharp teeth, greyish skin, mostly naked. They looked like living dolls, such as goblin children might play with—vicious, murderous dolls, Aramis amended as the creature brandished a hardy bow, nasty stone-tipped arrow already nocked.

After what seemed too long a time of rapid-fire back-and-forth between the creature and Arielda, their guide turned and said, “Show them your marks.”

“I beg your pardon?” Aramis said.

“Beg later. Show now,” she said between clenched teeth. Obviously, negotiations weren’t going in their favor.

“We don’t know what you’re talking about,” Porthos explained in the exaggerated enunciation a person used when talking to a small child or a foreigner.

Arielda gave them an impatient look. “On the backs of your necks. The marks.”

The creature barked something belligerent, and she repeated, “Now!” at a low volume but with great emphasis.

And that’s how Aramis came to discover that he and Porthos had matching tattoos just under the lower hairline on the back of their necks: Three crude vertical slashes traversed by a sickle shape on its back.

“It’s a mark of transit. It gives you permission to be here.”

Aramis was torn between anger at having been permanently marked without his permission and confusion regarding how such a mark could have come to be there without him having felt it.

Porthos just shrugged—his body was a map of scars that told the story of his hard life. One more scar meant little, and besides, it was mostly hidden by his hair.

Arielda said, “We have until the sun sets to clear their border.” Sunset was at least three hours off.

“How far is it?” Porthos asked.

“A league or so.”

They smiled in tandem. “That’s easy.” They’d marched twelve times that length on occasion.

“Something about the pixies you should know,” Arielda said. Aramis did not like at all the way she seemed to be holding back a smirk.

“Yes?”

“They’re pretty good archers.”

“True,” Aramis answered.

“Though such wee shot can hardly do any damage,” Porthos continued.

“But even better with herbcraft,” she finished.

“What is that supposed to m—” Aramis began, but darkness encroached before he could even finish the question.

*****

d’Artagnan led Athos through a rabbit warren of nondescript servants’ halls bustling with “goblins,” d’Artagnan called them, and into a corridor considerably more upscale, where the quality of light intimated afternoon. Here there were windows, paned in the same pale green glass, and beyond them Athos could see nothing but the swaying branches and lush green leaves of trees.

“Where are we?” he asked, and d’Artagnan said, “The palace is built into the oldest tree in the Faire. It’s called the Mother Tree. We’re going to my rooms,” he added, indicating a door just ahead.

Two dour-faced guards, beautiful and cold, flanked the door, and though neither looked at Athos directly, he felt their scrutiny and didn’t think he was imagining the subtle shift in their expressions that suggested they found him wanting.

d’Artagnan laid his hand to an inlaid pattern on the door—a series of intricately carved knots—and the door opened soundlessly into a wide, bright space, in which there were two straight-backed chairs at a table; an upholstered chair beside a neatly swept fireplace; a sideboard, crystal decanters sparkling in the ubiquitous light; and a writing desk and stool pushed up under one of the three tall, arched windows that bathed the room in a comforting glow.

Through an open door to the right, Athos could see the canopy of a wide, plush bed covered in a blanket in muted jewel tones; a nightstand, washstand; pair of boots polished to a buttery gleam.

“Please, sit. Will you have wine?”

Remembering the delightful vintage that Raven had given him, Athos nodded gratefully and moved to a window with his cup. Through the lush foliage of the Mother Tree, he could just make out the smoothed edges of a corner some distance away, a set of windows giving him a supercilious stare, as if asking him what right he had to look upon them.

“Truly a prince’s quarters,” he murmured, and d’Artagnan, who’d stepped hesitantly up beside him, looked abashed.

“I didn’t ask for any of this.”

Athos half turned toward d’Artagnan and propped a shoulder against the window frame. In profile, his young friend looked more alien, his ears and cheekbones, the slant of his eyes more pronounced.

“You wear it well,” he answered, voice low, as if they were discussing more intimate secrets.

Perhaps they were.

The delightful blush suffusing d’Artagnan’s cheek indicated that his words had struck home.

“I—you don’t find me…” Here, his courage faltered, and he trailed off, the hand not holding his wine waving feebly.

For as much as he had still not entirely recovered from his sense of betrayal at d’Artagnan having locked him away, Athos’ heart clenched in sudden, jagged pain at the uncertainty in d’Artagnan’s tone and in his features.

“Look at me,” he commanded, pushing himself away from his slouch to face d’Artagnan with only the light of the window between them.

d’Artagnan mirrored his stance but fastened his eyes on Athos’ throat, unable or unwilling to look him in the eyes.

With an impatient tsk, Athos drew d’Artagnan toward him, wrapping him firmly in an embrace meant more for assurance than for affection.

He felt d’Artagnan relax in increments, until at last the ghost of his breath washed over Athos’ neck, making him shiver.

“Thank you.”

Athos pushed him back to arm’s length but kept him there, firm in the bracket of his hands. “Look at me.”

This time, d’Artagnan had no trouble meeting his gaze.

“I will say this once and only once and then we will speak no more of it.” He paused, waiting for the nod that indicated d’Artagnan understood. “Man or fairy or somewhere in between, you are d’Artagnan, Musketeer in training, Gascon in origin, and beloved in my sight.”

d’Artagnan’s eyes widened a fraction at the last descriptor, and Athos had a moment’s panic at what he had given away by his words, but he didn’t let his own gaze falter, didn’t by an ounce of pressure shift his grip on d’Artagnan’s arms.

 _See that you do not betray that love_ , Athos did not say. He no longer believed that anyone could be trusted to make such a promise, so he refused to ask it even of d’Artagnan. Instead, he said, “Each for the other?”

An unsteady, lopsided grin wobbled across d’Artagnan’s mouth, and he nodded and said, “Yes,” eyes shining with trust and affection and what Athos suspected was love.

“Now, I cannot disgrace your princeliness looking like this when I go before the court to declare my intentions. We need to make me look worthy of your hand.”

“You are worthy no matter what you wear,” d’Artagnan observed, stepping back as Athos released him—and the tension of the moment.

Athos gave an insouciant shrug. “Perhaps true. But still, when a Musketeer appears before foreign dignitaries, he must be in dress uniform.”

d’Artagnan gestured toward the bedroom. “I think I have just the thing.”

Later, pressed up against the armoire door, arms trapped in the vest-coat he’d been trying on, d’Artagnan’s thigh a tempting surface against which to rut, mind distracted by the smooth tongue in his mouth; the heat of the hand that gripped his waist beneath vest-coat and shirt; the sound d’Artagnan made, a swallowed moan, as he pressed harder against Athos and let him feel the growing evidence of his passion…

Later, Athos would wonder who had initiated the embrace, but right now, battling mightily with the urge to take what he wanted, desperate to remember why this was a bad idea, and grasping frantically at the shreds of his self-control, he was mostly grateful more than embarrassed to hear a deliberately loud clearing of the throat, which apparently cut through the haze of d’Artagnan’s need as well.

He stepped away from Athos, who had already seen Raven standing in the doorway, looking not even a little regretful, belying his words— “My apologies for the intrusion, Prince, but you did not answer my knock, though the guards told me that you were within.”

d’Artagnan didn’t have years of experience as a nobleman at his command, so it was doubly impressive when he adopted an arch expression, managing to look down his nose at the taller Raven, and entirely ignoring his erection, visible even through the draping of own vest-coat.

“How is it that you gained entrance at all? The lock answers to my hand alone.”

For the first time in their brief but pointed acquaintance, Raven looked uncertain of himself.

“These used to be your father’s rooms,” he said, as if that were explanation enough.

“And you had free access to them?” d’Artagnan asked, doubt coloring his tone.

But Raven had gotten over his discomfort, apparently, for he said, simply, “Yes.”

The implication hung on the air between them.

“Good friends, indeed,” Athos observed, and Raven gave him a murderous glare. The Musketeer raised his hands in a sign of peace. “I mean no judgment,” and he didn’t, except where Raven’s complicity in Kayin’s death was concerned. On that he had a judgment or two making regular circuits in his brain.

“Why have you come?” d’Artagnan asked, cutting through the ugly silence to the heart of it.

“It is your other… _friend_ …” The inflection was deliberate, insolent. “He is in danger. You must come at once.”

“But he was under the Queen’s care,” d’Artagnan said.

Raven shrugged. “Her care can be…unpredictable.”

d’Artagnan suddenly drew himself up, adjusted his sword belt, and moved toward the door, leaving both of his suitors staring after him. “I must go.”

And then he was gone.

Raven turned hooded eyes on Athos. “Flesh is weak. Don’t mistake lust for something more meaningful. Among our kind—particularly among Cainson’s lineage—sex is about influence and power, not love. We have not thrived in secret for a thousand thousand years by letting emotion get in the way of reason.”

Athos snorted. “For all your age, you still manage to sound like a child. A _jealous_ child.”

Raven closed the space between them, but Athos didn’t even blink at the display of speed. Instead, he smirked and leaned back against the still-open armoire door. He’d be damned if he’d give the fairy the satisfaction of appearing affected by his words.

Raven pressed on: “I can keep him safe. You cannot. If you truly have feelings for him, you will not declare your intention to court him in the challenge. Once the other human is dead and you have conceded, I will be able to protect the Prince.”

“Hmm,” said Athos, neither agreeing nor denying. “And not coincidentally get out from beneath the control of your not-so-merciful queen.”

To his surprise, Raven nodded his head, acknowledging the truth of Athos’ words. “Of course there is a benefit to me, as well.”

“You don’t find it a little…incestuous…to want to bed the son of your dead lover?”

Ravens fists clenched, and Athos braced himself for a beating. The guard’s eyes darkened with fury, and color climbed into his cheeks, two high, angry beacons warning of the coming danger.

“What Kayin and I were cannot be reduced to your primitive understanding.”

“So you do have feelings after all,” Athos remarked with another smirk, pushing himself upright so that they were now no more than inches apart.

He had to look up into Raven’s face, but despite their differences in height and respective strength, Athos didn’t feel even a little afraid. If Raven were going to hurt him, he’d have done so already.

“Remember that feeling later, Raven, when I have beaten you in the challenge and claimed my place at d’Artagnan’s side.”

“His side?” It was Raven’s turn to smirk, a curl of his lip that was one part pity, one part patronizing. He gave an exaggerated look around the otherwise empty bedchamber, making his point with no other words. Then he turned on his heel and departed, leaving Athos alone with the echo of the closing outer door and a recognition that Raven was right: d’Artagnan had left him to run to Jean-Marie’s aid.

Much as he told himself that d’Artagnan would hardly be fit material for the Musketeers if he left a friend in need, there was a niggling part of Athos that wondered if loyalty was all that drove d’Artagnan.

Another, darker part of Athos told him he was a fool even to ask.

*****

Aramis wondered idly just how many times on this trip he would awake in an awkward position on the wet ground.

As a booted foot none-too-gently tapped him in the kidneys—an action that must have been repeated several times, given the soreness in his lower back—Aramis rolled away from the assault and wobbled onto his hands and knees. A few feet away, he saw Porthos doing likewise.

“What happened?”

“Drathis and his band left, you passed out, and we lost two hours of daylight.”

That left them little more than an hour to cover a league.

“Best get moving then,” he said, standing up. Only to sit down hard, rattling the teeth in his head.

Porthos managed to stay upright longer, windmilling his arms to try to maintain balance, but he, too, succumbed to the after-effects of whatever had been on the pixies’ darts.

“Why aren’t you staggering?” Porthos asked their guide.

She shrugged. “They weren’t trying to hit me,” and then, seeing their looks, tapped a mark on her neck, just below her right ear. Aramis had noted it before but had been unable to make out what it was.

“This marks me as a courier. Under the terms of the treaty, all couriers get safe passage.”

“When will this stuff wear off, then?” Aramis asked, closing his eyes against a swoop of vertigo that threatened to empty the contents of his stomach.

“Long after the pixies have come back to arrest you for violating the terms of their curfew.”

“Then we have to go on, regardless.” Aramis tried once more to stand, and this time, prepared as he was for the feeling of the earth pitching beneath his feet like a ship’s deck in a tossing storm, he managed to succeed. Porthos was already on his feet again, swaying but determined.

“Lead on,” Aramis said, falling into step beside his comrade and slinging an arm across Porthos’ back. Porthos draped his over Aramis’ shoulders, and they began the long, staggering journey toward the border of fairyland.

“Pixies,” Porthos muttered disgustedly, clinging to Aramis as they reached a boggy stretch.

Suddenly, Aramis missed the Red Guard most fervently.

*****

d’Artagnan returned with Jean-Marie in tow.

At that moment, the boy didn’t look like much of a rival for d’Artagnan’s affections. Though there were no obvious marks of the punishment the Queen had promised, no torn clothes or bloodstains, the boy’s eyes were sunk in his head, the skin around them bruised, and there was a gauntness to his cheeks that suggested long privation…or extreme suffering.

Still, Athos could see that Jean-Marie de Batz de Castelmore was attractive, if one liked tall, lean, dark-haired, green-eyed boys, for though Jean-Marie and d’Artagnan were of an age, the former looked a decade younger than the latter, even in Jean-Marie’s current state of debilitation.

d’Artagnan had been supporting him with an arm under his two, and as they came through the door, Athos had helped d’Artagnan lower Jean-Marie into a chair at the table. Unbidden, Athos had gone to the sideboard and poured Jean-Marie a generous cup of wine.

Jean-Marie startled when the cup came into his line of sight, and he took it with a hand that shook so badly that d’Artagnan moved to kneel beside him to help him drink.

“Allow me,” Athos said, pulling up the other chair and taking the cup once more from the trembling man.

As Athos tended to Jean-Marie, d’Artagnan closed the door and began prowling the room’s perimeter.

In a few minutes, the wine had had its intended effect, and Jean-Marie was able to hold the cup himself. Athos got up to retrieve the bottle, and when he turned back to the table, d’Artagnan had taken his seat and moved it closer to Jean-Marie.

Pointedly, Athos put the bottle and two more cups on the table, pouring for himself and d’Artagnan before moving to stand next to the window opposite the table, offering the two what privacy he could without leaving the room altogether.

“You didn’t come for me.”

It was said so quietly that if the room hadn’t been utterly still, Athos, only a few feet away, wouldn’t have heard him. Jean-Marie sat at the table staring into his cup, directing his words at the dregs of wine in it.

“I did,” d’Artagnan insisted, reaching out to put a hand on one of Jean-Marie’s.

Jean-Marie pulled away, drawing a stricken look from d’Artagnan.

“The queen’s guards wouldn’t let me enter the Arboretum, even after I commanded them as prince of the realm. I was afraid that if I made too much of a fuss, you’d be punished the worse for it.”

“I was punished badly enough. And it was all for you that I earned it to begin with.”

This was said at greater volume and accompanied by an accusatory look.

“I know,” d’Artagnan answered, anguish clear in his voice. “And I’m sorry that you suffered in my stead, Jean-Marie. You know I’d have done anything to prevent it.”

“Like you did the last time?” The venom in Jean-Marie’s tone startled Athos into pushing away from the wall and taking a step toward the table.

d’Artagnan flinched and raised a staying hand to keep Athos from interfering.

“I couldn’t stay, Jean-Marie. You know that! You know what would have happened to me—to _both_ of us—if I’d stayed.”

“It happened to me anyway.”

Devastation painted d’Artagnan’s face in shadow and his eyes grew flat with despair.

“I didn’t know…”

“You knew! You had to know he wouldn’t be content with threats alone.”

“You’re the Comte’s son, surely that protected—.”

“No one protected me except you, and you _left_ me!”

The petulance with which he said it was somehow more intimate than anger, and Athos grew aware suddenly that he was gaping. He turned from the direction of the table and moved toward the bedroom, intending to shut himself up in there to give them what privacy he could.

“Wait,” d’Artagnan said, though the word was choked out, like he was swallowing around a lump in his throat. “Don’t go.”

“Yes, don’t go,” Jean-Marie mocked. “It’s d’Artagnan’s job to run away.”

Any other man who had spoken in that tone to d’Artagnan would have earned himself a challenge, friend or no, but d’Artagnan merely slumped dispiritedly at the table, hands hanging loose at his sides, and Athos was forced to take his cues from d’Artagnan, hard as that was to accept.

“Athos can help,” d’Artagnan explained, sounding rather unsure of that claim as he made it.

A look of cunning passed across Jean-Marie’s face so quickly that Athos may have thought he was imagining it if he had not been looking directly at him.

Then Jean-Marie’s face took on an expression of abject sorrow.

“d’Artagnan,” he said, reaching out both hands to grasp d’Artagnan’s right. “Forgive me, my dear, dear friend. I am not myself. The trials I have endured, the t-torture. I am undone. Please say you’ll forgive me for speaking so awfully to you.”

“Of course,” d’Artagnan breathed, stumbling over his words in his relief. “Of course, Jean-Marie, there’s nothing to forgive. You have every right to be upset with me. I’ve been a terrible friend.”

Jean-Marie stroked d’Artagnan’s hand and shook his head. “No, you haven’t. It’s my own fault for trying to earn your respect by being someone I’m not, bursting into the throne room like that and expecting that I could prevail. I’m—I’m weak. Nothing like you.”

Athos had once been fooled for too long by a far better expert at manipulating the human heart to ever be deceived by this amateur. Sick of the drama being expertly acted in front of him, Athos interrupted. “Yes, what were you expecting to achieve by that stunt, I wonder?”

He realized his mistake when d’Artagnan shot him a filthy look. Someone as inexperienced in matters of the heart as d’Artagnan would certainly be taken in by Jean-Marie’s little-boy-lost routine.

He rephrased: “That is, didn’t you say you had information for the queen? What was it?”

“It seems silly now.” Jean-Marie looked up at d’Artagnan through his long lashes, a delicate blush suffusing his cheeks. “I overheard a rumor from the guards—you know they talk in front of me as if I were a pet. I heard one of the guards saying that Pavo was going to contest your lineage and have you both removed from power so that they might start a war.”

Athos considered Jean’Marie’s words. They matched what he already knew. In fact—

“This isn’t news at all. d’Artagnan himself told me of a similar plot. Surely the queen must already have been aware of it.”

Jean-Marie shrugged guilelessly, his eyes widening as if to suggest surprise. If Jean-Marie were _actually_ shocked, Athos would eat his boots.

But what would be the motive for Jean-Marie risking his life as he had to try to barter useless information?

It came to Athos as he watched Jean-Marie watching d’Artagnan from beneath the cover of those beguiling lashes: Jean-Marie had wanted to see Athos himself, to gauge the competition and be sure that Jean-Marie wasn’t forgotten in the tumult.

“You must have known how the queen would react to your interruption.” It was not quite an accusation but not wholly a question either.

Jean-Marie gave him a dirty look of his own, but d’Artagnan latched on to Athos’ observation.

“You’ve been here long enough to know how dangerous the queen is, even when she isn’t being challenged. Why would you take such a terrible risk?”

Jean-Marie dropped d’Artagnan’s hands abruptly and sat back in his chair, putting a limited distance between them.

He mumbled the explanation in the direction of his lap.

“I wanted to show you that I could help you in the same way _he_ could.” A chin-jut in Athos’ direction punctuated the boy’s rudeness.

“Athos?” d’Artagnan sounded astonished. “But he’s a Musketeer!” He exclaimed it as though the title itself were explanation enough, and Athos felt a little fire of pride light in his chest to hear the off-handed way that d’Artagnan gave him the compliment.

“I’m aware. Not a day passed in this wretched place but you reminded me about your good friend Athos, the King’s Musketeer.” Jean-Marie’s mask was slipping, venom seeping into his tone.

It was d’Artagnan’s turn to sit back in his chair. “I spoke of Athos—and Aramis and Porthos—to give you hope, to show you that all was not lost. I thought you’d be glad to know that we would be rescued.”

“Rescued?” There was a wealth of scorn in the single word, and d’Artagnan flushed, giving Athos a guilty look, as if he were responsible for Jean-Marie’s opinion of Athos’ efforts thus far.

“I’ll admit,” Athos said, all urbane amusement, “the plan so far seems to require a little adjustment. But there is no cause to despair as yet. When I’ve won the contest, d’Artagnan and I can protect you.”

d’Artagnan was looking at Athos, but Athos was watching Jean-Marie, so he had no trouble catching the flash of fierce hatred that passed through Jean-Marie’s eyes before he dropped his lashes over them and hung his head, as if in shame.

“I suppose it’s likely that you’ll prevail,” Jean-Marie muttered with ill-disguised sulkiness.

“Yes, of course Athos will win,” d’Artagnan said. “And then we’ll all go home.”

As warmed as he was by d’Artagnan’s confidence in him, Athos was equally unsettled by the expression on Jean-Marie’s face: spiteful malice such as he’d only ever seen once before, on another such one who used lashes to her advantage.

Sighing inwardly, Athos pulled the upholstered chair from its place beside the fire and sat down at the table with them, pouring himself some more wine and settling back in his seat.

“If we’re to succeed in escaping this place with all of our limbs intact, we need a plan,” he said, ignoring Jean-Marie’s petulant moue. Much better men than Jean-Marie de Batz de Castelmore had pouted in Athos’ general direction. This boy was hardly a match for His Royal Highness’ towering sulks.

A familiar gleam lit d’Artagnan’s eyes, and Athos swallowed a second sigh, this time in relief. The man he knew, his brother in arms, his would-be lover, was still alive and well beneath the unfamiliar features and the pall of obligation that Jean-Marie cast over him.

Athos would see d’Artagnan free of both this place and of the heir of Castelmore, or he’d die trying.

*****

They cut it close enough that the sound of pursuit resolved into Drathis and his clan, who flew in a wedge formation, en masse, floating to a graceful halt at the border between pixie territory and the fairy realm, and shouted what Aramis assumed—by the tone—were aspersions on their character and perhaps their parentage.

Judging from the smirk on Arielda’s face, some of them were rather humorous, at least to their snide, laconic guide.

Dusk was smudging shadows into pitch in the forest they faced. Towering trees, far taller and broader around than anything the Musketeers had ever seen in their world, stretched ahead of them until they were swallowed by darkness.

They didn’t want to camp on the verge, within arrow-shot of the pixies, but they weren’t sanguine about their chances of traversing even a half-league of that forest in the dark.

“I’ll lead you,” Arielda promised, and after the two men exchanged speaking glances, they followed her. After all, it wouldn’t do for the reputation of the Musketeers to be besmirched in this foreign land by any show of cowardice on their parts.

Still, they stayed close to one another and kept sharp eyes on Arielda’s receding back.

Eventually, she signaled a halt at a clearing in the forest made by the mysterious toppling of a half-dozen leafy giants.

“We’ll want a fire. Collect wood, but don’t stray beyond shouting distance of this spot.”

“Why?” Porthos asked, hand already on the pommel of his sword. “What lives in these woods?”

She cocked an eyebrow at him. “You’re better off not knowing.”

“No,” Aramis demurred. “I think we’ve had enough of living in the dark, as it were.” He gave her one of his finer smiles.

She may have rolled her eyes, but it was too dark to tell. “Giant spiders, flesh-eating slugs, three varieties of venomous snakes—one of them night-crawling—bats that carry disease and wild boar that aren’t particular about the state or origin of their dinner.”

“Ah,” said Aramis. “We’ll just go collect firewood, then.”

Through long practice, Aramis and Porthos kept each other in view and worked in synch on adjacent paths, scouring the ground for downed limbs and dried undergrowth.

Back at the clearing, Arielda seemed satisfied with their work but sent them off again in a different direction for more wood. “For insurance,” she said, though Aramis thought she might be having fun at their expense.

Three trips altogether made an impressive pile, and soon a cheerful blaze drove the shadows back, building an impenetrable wall of darkness around them in a twelve-foot ring. If something stirred beyond the firelight’s reach, they wouldn’t see it.

Aramis considered that a mixed blessing. The day’s events had caught up with them both, their faces split by yawns in between chewing on the tough jerky and shriveled apples that Arielda had provided for their sustenance.

Making a point of not thinking about where the meat came from, Aramis chewed doggedly, washed the repast down with tepid water that tasted of the leather of the skin it was in, and then stretched his cloak out beside Porthos’.

“Three watches. I’ll take the first. You—” she indicated Porthos with her knife blade, “the second, you—” Aramis, “the third.”

“How do you judge time here?” Porthos asked sensibly.

“When the moon sets over the treetops, your shift will be done,” she answered. She glanced at Aramis, who hurried to say, “When the sky lightens to the east I’ll rouse you both.”

She nodded, satisfied, and went to sit on a downed trunk, her back to the fire, eyes on the darkness.

Aramis and Porthos stretched out on their cloaks with their heads to the fire and their feet facing the darkness opposite where Arielda watched. Both men slept with their swords at their sides. As he felt sleep creeping over him, Aramis reached out to link his fingers with Porthos’ for a moment of comfort. Porthos squeezed encouragingly and then dragged his finger across Aramis’ palm, raising delicious shivers in his belly and putting a smile on his face that he wore down into sleep.

*****

Athos had to give the boy credit: He was smart enough to know when to quit while he was ahead. Rather than attempting to claim equal right in the contest to win d’Artagnan’s hand in marriage, Jean-Marie agreed to “let” Athos win so that the stronger of them would be pitted against Raven, a formidable opponent who presented a significant challenge to Athos, trained and seasoned warrior though he was.

Jean-Marie would have been made a mincemeat, and while a small part of Athos enjoyed imagining that, he was a better man than to actually effect it.

“We’re assuming the challenges will be the same for each suitor,” Athos said. They’d finished hashing out the who’s-on-top argument and segued into speculating on the nature of the contest itself.

d’Artagnan shrugged. “The easiest way to find out would be for you to report to the Recorder of Contests to state your intention to join the challenge. The deadline for declarations is tomorrow morning. Once every suitor is accounted for, there will be a general reading of the rules of the contest and an explanation of the challenges.”

“You’re just now mentioning this?” Athos asked drily.

Another shrug. d’Artagnan looked weary, and Athos sympathized. They’d considered every political motivation dissenters to the queen might have and revisited Raven’s interest in declaring his intentions. Their throats were dry, the wine was gone, and they’d missed dinner, if the hollow feeling in his stomach were any indication.

“We’ll have to leave bright and early tomorrow; the Recorder is probably gone from his office by now.”

Athos thought back over Raven’s “advice” and the timing of his appearance in d’Artagnan’s suite. Had he sent d’Artagnan off to fetch Jean-Marie in the hopes that Athos would thereby miss the deadline for declarations?

Athos rubbed his eyes, stood, and stretched, muscles stiff from sitting for so long protesting at the motion. He winced, ran his tongue around his teeth, and grimaced at the sensation.

“We should have dinner and get to bed early.”

d’Artagnan, who had himself stood up, cast a suddenly wild eye at the door to his bedroom, and Athos could see him realize that there was yet one problem they had not overcome.

Surely, Jean-Marie had his own rooms? He’d been there much longer than Athos himself.

Unless Jean-Marie had been sleeping in d’Artagnan’s bed…

Doubtless sensing that tensions had shifted, Jean-Marie rose, wincing and flinching as he gained his full height, as if he were in great pain.

Athos was too well-bred to roll his eyes, but it was a near thing.

“Shall we send a physician to your room for you?” Athos asked, all solicitousness and good grace.

Jean-Marie darted a glare at him, but when d’Artagnan said, “He can’t stay in his rooms alone. He’s a target for our enemies.”

Athos cursed d’Artagnan’s common sense and his own damnable honor; it was true that the danger to Jean-Marie was very real.

“Fine,” Athos said. “Then we’ll have a physician brought to us here.”

d’Artagnan nodded. “Yes. Jean-Marie, you can sleep in my bed tonight. I’ll sleep on the floor outside the bedroom door and take turns with Athos keeping watch.”

Athos cursed his honor a second time; he was dog tired and ready for some uninterrupted sleep. An incipient headache was knocking about behind his left eye, and his stomach was flipping queasily for lack of sustenance and too much wine. Nevertheless, he would keep watch. Certainly, he’d had it worse on many occasions.

As if having read his mind, d’Artagnan said, “I’d forgotten all about dinner. Let me call for something to be brought to us. Will a cold supper do?”

It did nicely, in fact. It seemed that for as strange as the fairy realm was, those who called it home had surprisingly human tastes in their main dishes, including something that was a great deal like chicken and another platter of cold meat that bore a notable similarity to beef. There was smooth, soft cheese to spread on fresh, puffy rolls; greens that tasted of mint and pepper; a pear-like fruit; and more of the excellent wine.

What exhaustion hadn’t accomplished repletion did, and Athos found his mood mellowed to a nearer tolerance for Jean-Marie, who was, after all, completely inexperienced in the kind of (mis)adventure he’d been thrust into of late.

They gave him the privacy of the bedroom as the physician examined him and saw that he drank all of the diffusion said physician prescribed.

A jovial, red-faced fairy of middling height, with ginger hair and pale eyes the color of the sun through fog, he was the closest to stocky Athos had seen of the Fair Folk. Perhaps it was because he seemed almost human, or maybe it was his good-natured attitude. Whatever the cause, Athos took to him almost at once.

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” the physician assured a worried d’Artagnan.“The draught I’ve brought is just the thing for what he’s suffered. I make it by the gallon, you know. Our Lady is quite active in her…hobbies.” He winked and bustled toward the door.

“However, should he show signs of fever or have trouble breathing or walking, you should call me at once.”

At d’Artagnan’s alarmed noise, the physician waved his hand and said, “No, no, it’s only that I have to say these things. Truly, the boy had very little exposure to the queen’s ministrations. Why, when I was just a wee lad, I spent six days in the Arboretum. Of course, that was under a different ruler, but still—Six!

Athos was amused by the physician’s intimation that what Jean-Marie had suffered wasn’t much more than equivalent to a flesh wound in battle, and indeed, his attitude seemed to ease some of d’Artagnan’s worry.

“Sir doctor, thank you for coming on such short notice,” d’Artagnan said, showing the doctor to the door.

“Please,” the physician said, “Call me Feverfew. And call me again at once if anything changes for the worse with your young friend.” And with a casual wave, he departed.

d’Artagnan slumped against the closed door and gave Athos a tired look.

“Feverfew?” He had to ask.

“Names are determined by occupation in the Faire. Guards are birds, tradesmen are metals, plants, tools, things of that sort. Only the high court takes ancestral names based on historical deeds and the like.”

“Ah. But ‘Cainson’?”

d’Artagnan shrugged. “I wasn’t named as a child, and my parents are both dead, so I think the queen chose it for the reminder that I’m descended from the royal line.” A shadow crossed his features, but before Athos could interpret it, d’Artagnan changed the subject.

“Let me make sure that Jean-Marie is comfortable, and then maybe we could talk for a while before I take the first watch?”

“Is it likely anyone will attack your apartment with the queen’s guard posted right outside?”

d’Artagnan’s shrug was too studied to be genuine. “Those guards could be part of Pavo’s cabal.”

The thought had occurred to Athos, but he had rather hoped he was being paranoid. Apparently not.

Just then, a murmur from the next room drew d’Artagnan away. Athos tried to pretend it didn’t bother him that d’Artagnan closed the bedroom door between them.

He sat staring into a cup of wine and mulling over the day’s events as darkness drew a blanket across the features of the room and he at last bestirred himself to get up and light a lamp.

Whatever oil therein was sweet, filling the room with a bright, pleasant odor, as if a spring breeze were wafting through the space. The light itself was yellow, casting a comforting glow that softened the edges of the furniture and made him think of nights at his mother’s knee by the fire in her parlor.

Eventually, Athos was brought out of his memories by d’Artagnan, who crept back into the room, carefully bringing the door to against its jamb to avoid making a sound. He had removed his boots, Athos noticed, and now padded silently across the room to join Athos at the table.

“He’s asleep,” d’Artagnan said, accepting a cup of wine from Athos with a grateful nod. “I think he’ll be better come morning.”

“What _is_ the Arboretum?” Athos asked, having struck upon that one of the thousand questions he had. “Besides the obvious, that is,” he added, waving a hand skyward as though gesturing at trees.

“You’ve already had a taste of Queen Serei’s specific power.”

Athos nodded. “She can control the mind of others.”

“Mind and body,” d’Artagnan corrected. “I’m told that all in my line have the command of body and mind. In my father’s case—and in my own, apparently—the power manifests most often in the art of seduction. It’s said that my father could have had any fairy, male or female, he wanted.”

“But he chose Raven?”

d’Artagnan shook his head. “I think that was a secret affair. My father was married for a time to Vanessa, a daughter of Queen Serei’s advisor, Vulpine, but when my father’s…dalliance…with my mother was discovered, Vanessa demanded and won a divorce. It was quite a scandal, I’m led to believe.”

“Why would your father risk so much just to be with, forgive me, a human woman?”

d’Artagnan smiled, a sad, weary smile. “Vanessa could not produce an heir. According to Raven, the Fair Folk as a whole have suffered a catastrophic decline in fertility. There have been only a handful of full-blooded fairies born in the last century. My father believed he could conceive a child with a human, and he proved his theory right.”

“But at great cost to the woman, himself, and you.”

“I have paid the least for his choice,” d’Artagnan demurred.

“Still, here we are.”

d’Artagnan looked across the table at Athos, holding his gaze, and then slid his hand across partway, palm up, in a silent plea for touch.

Athos was happy to oblige him, and they sat like that for the span of perhaps a quarter of an hour. Athos reveled in the contact and in the way the forgiving glow of the oil lamps captured the bright lights in d’Artagnan’s hair and the beauty of his eyes.

He was beginning to think they’d regret having given up the bed when d’Artagnan sighed and dropped his eyes to the table, though he did not release his grip on Athos’ hand.

“We have to talk about Jean-Marie.”

Athos felt the heat that had been growing in his belly doused by cold reality, and he sat up straighter, letting go of d’Artagnan’s hand.

When d’Artagnan once more looked up, he seemed to have aged and the soft light had sharpened, casting shadows over his cheeks and sinking his eyes in their sockets.

He looked less human than he had only moments before, and Athos wondered if it were merely a trick of the light or if this were a demonstration of d’Artagnan’s particular power.

“I’m not human, Athos,” he said then, answering Athos’ unspoken question. “No matter how I hide it, by glamour or geas, I am half-fairy underneath, and since coming to the Faire, I’ve—” He hesitated, clearly struggling to put into words whatever awful revelation he was about to unleash.

Athos felt the tension building between them and held his breath. He didn’t want to hear anything more. He didn’t want d’Artagnan to continue with this confession. Whatever came out of his mouth now would be disaster for them both, he felt, though he couldn’t have said from where his sudden sense of doom had come.

He was a King’s Musketeer, however, and by God and His divinely appointed King, Athos would stand his ground, no matter that he wanted to get up from the table and flee the room or lunge across it to silence d’Artagnan with a brutal kiss.

“I’ve discovered things about myself that I can’t seem to deny or suppress.”

“Nor should you,” Athos rasped, tongue dry in his mouth.

“You say that without knowing what it is that I speak of,” d’Artagnan noted.

“Then tell me.”

d’Artagnan made an abortive gesture, as though to deny Athos’ demand.

“d’Artagnan, you are my friend and brother, come whatever else may. Nothing you say will change that.”

d’Artagnan took a deep breath, nodded to himself, and once again met Athos with a direct look. “I want you.”

Relief and surprise startled a bark of laughter out of him, and he winced as d’Artagnan cast a worried look at the bedroom door.

“I assure you, the feeling is entirely mutual.”

“No,” d’Artagnan argued. “You don’t understand. I want you in the usual ways: I want to take you in my mouth and make you writhe. I want to come inside of you and feel you around me. I want you to drive yourself into me until I can’t remember my name.”

Athos stirred, suddenly unable to sit comfortably still, and started to reach for d’Artagnan across the table.

But d’Artagnan raised a quelling hand.

“I want to eat your seed and your blood and your breath and your sweat. I want to take everything from you, filling myself, and leave you empty. Forever.”

Something in the gravity of his tone struck Athos. d’Artagnan wasn’t being metaphoric or melodramatic. He meant, quite literally, that their coupling could potentially destroy Athos.

A perverse part of him thrilled at the idea of such danger.

But the King’s Musketeer had too long an ascendancy to let such a thing take hold of him.

“Can you control it, this darker desire?”

d’Artagnan shook his head, a look of despair transforming his features. “I don’t know. I think, perhaps, with time and…experience.” He shrugged helplessly. “But I can’t risk it. Risk _you_.”

Athos nodded absently. His mind was racing along myriad paths, each of them trying to imagine a scenario in which he and d’Artagnan could fulfill their mutual desires, consummate their love, escape the Faire, and survive it all.

He didn’t have enough information.

“What has this to do with Jean-Marie?” he asked then, grateful to have a legitimate digression. His body was still hot with the arousal d’Artagnan’s confession—all of it—had raised in him, and he needed time to cool his ardor.

Nothing could do that better than discussing the rival for d’Artagnan’s affections sleeping in the next room.

If anything, d’Artagnan’s expression grew even more somber.

“Jean-Marie was my…first.”

Even though Athos had expected that, it still worked effectively to cool his passion to a degree. It didn’t matter to him that d’Artagnan wasn’t a virgin; surely, Athos would be a monumental hypocrite if it did.

But imagining d’Artagnan with that simpering fool in the next room…

“Go on,” Athos said, trying to suggest by his tone that he was making no judgment, for indeed, he was not.

“According to everything I’ve been able to discover about my father’s ‘gift,’ the first one on whom it’s used is immune from the less desirable effects of the power.”

That made a kind of sense. “Your power needs to be _initiated_.”

d’Artagnan appeared relieved that Athos seemed to understand.

"Leaving you to wield the killing power of your passion against your enemies.” Raven’s words about the manner in which d’Artagnan’s ancestors had used sex for power and influence made a lot more sense now.

d’Artagnan nodded again, clearly miserable.

“But I am not your enemy,” Athos said, reaching out to claim d’Artagnan’s hand once more. “And I trust you to be gentle with me when we do, at last, come together as lovers in bed.” He kept his tone teasing and smiled at d’Artagnan, who responded to both tone and gesture by surging across the table, knocking over cups and bottle, to tangle his free hand in Athos’ hair and pull him up into a searing kiss.

This was becoming something of a habit with them, but Athos couldn’t find it in himself just then to mind.

Their hands, still clasped, were trapped between them, and Athos wondered if d’Artagnan could feel his heart beating furiously against the back of his hand where it rested against his chest. The kiss was devouring, d’Artagnan’s tongue delving into his mouth, hot and wet and perfect, and he wanted d’Artagnan to crawl inside of him. He stood up and tried to open himself wider, heedless of the table’s edge digging into his thighs or the awkward angle of his neck as d’Artagnan grew more insistent.

At last, d’Artagnan made a frustrated noise and pulled away, leaving Athos stunned and swaying, until he had rounded the table and renewed the kiss, this time with his body flush against Athos’ in such a way that Athos could not mistake the urgency of d’Artagnan’s desire.

d’Artagnan moved against him, urging him back until he was against the wall between two windows, and then wedged his thigh between Athos’, raising his knee to apply pressure at a point that made Athos break away to growl in d’Artagnan’s ear, “Stop that unless you mean to finish this,” and then drop his hand to press meaningfully against d’Artagnan’s hard length.

d’Artagnan bucked into the touch and then swore, quiet but vicious, and pulled away, stalking clear across the room and stopping to brace his hands against the door, head down between them, shoulders heaving.

Athos adjusted himself discreetly, wiped a hand across his ravaged mouth, felt a frisson of desire as his lips burned under his fingers, and then walked as gracefully as he could manage, given his state, back to the table, where he began to right the tipped cups and bottle and mop up the spilled wine with a linen cloth left over from supper.

“The things I want to do to you,” d’Artagnan whispered hoarsely. “They’re unnatural.”

Athos gave a bitter chuckle.

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it. I don’t give a damn what other people think about us. I mean that when I was pressed against you, when I had you pinned, I wanted to _take_. Take everything. If you hadn’t spoken, I’m not sure I’d have been able to stop.”

“Then I would have stopped you,” Athos said simply.

At his words, d’Artagnan at last pushed away from the door and turned to face him. He was still hard, the glorious evidence limned clearly against the tight, soft leather of his pants. Athos licked his lips and busied himself pouring another cup of wine. It wouldn’t do to let his mind wander to the what-ifs. Not only was d’Artagnan clearly torn by what they’d done, but there was the not inconsequential matter of a potential audience sleeping in the next room.

Still, Athos had forgotten completely—forgotten Jean-Marie’s presence, forgotten the myriad threats to their lives, forgotten d’Artagnan’s “gift” and what it could potentially do.

Meaning dawned, and d’Artagnan, watching him, saw it and nodded, a bitter resignation aging his beautiful face, making him look stern and angry.

“You see it now, don’t you? You wouldn’t have stopped me. You’d have _let_ me.”

He was shaken by the revelation that he’d lost control—no, that he’d surrendered it. Athos hadn’t been in another’s power so completely since he’d been barely older than d’Artagnan was now, and even then it wasn’t preternatural.

“I still trust you,” he said at last, though the damning silence that had stretched out before his declaration had robbed it of some of its power.

“You shouldn’t.”

Athos gave him a speaking look. It said more clearly than words what a stubborn fool d’Artagnan was being.

“There’s something else.”

Athos let out a heavy sigh. “Of course there is.”

d’Artagnan ignored his rejoinder and forged ahead, relentless: “If you win the contest, we’ll be expected to…consummate our relationship. Immediately.”

“Ah,” said Athos, trying to incorporate yet more new information into his already overloaded brain. His ardor having been so thoroughly trampled by reality, he felt now only hollow and exhausted. Then he wondered if that weren’t because of d’Artagnan’s gift.

 _Jesu_.

“I think we should let Raven win.” In tone, it was as if d’Artagnan had said that they should disband the Musketeers and join the Red Guard.

Athos’ reaction was immediate and adamant. “No.”

“Athos, I can’t protect you—.”

“I don’t need your protection, d’Artagnan. I need you to have faith in yourself and in me. And I need a few hours’ sleep.”

“Of course,” d’Artagnan said stiffly, reacting to the last thing Athos had said and ignoring the rest. “I’ll take first watch.”

Athos didn’t argue. He was exhausted beyond reckoning, his mind unable to settle on one thought for more than a moment or two, and he would be no good to anyone without rest.

Tomorrow could take care of itself. Tonight…

He rose as gracefully as he could, given his weariness, and came around the table toward d’Artagnan, who, catching his intent, backed hastily toward the door, hands coming up as if to ward him off.

Athos stopped at those outstretched hands and waited, eyes on d’Artagnan’s, radiating a steadying calm he himself did not feel. Fortunately, he was a past master at feigning equanimity, regardless of the circumstance.

When d’Artagnan at last relented, Athos approached, raising his chin and waiting until d’Artagnan unbent enough to ghost a kiss across his lips.

It was chaste and stilted, but it was something, at any rate. Taking a blanket and bolster that d’Artagnan had brought from the bedroom earlier, Athos stretched out on the floor across the bedroom door and, despite the discomfort of the hard floor beneath him, fell almost at once into sleep.

*****

The night had been blessedly free of peril, his watch marked only by the rustling of a night wind high in the canopy overhead and the bustle and stirrings of night animals at their business. In the distance, an owl had sounded its doleful warning, but Aramis had ignored the shiver that had tried to make its way up his spine.

Still, despite the relative quiet of his watch, Aramis was grateful to see the first grey wash of dawn light bringing out the details of a world that had been made featureless by the profound dark.

Arielda rose soundlessly and slipped off into the undergrowth, leaving him a precious few minutes to wake Porthos in a way that was decidedly mutually agreeable. The fug of morning breath and the filth of their attire did little to dim their ardor, and it was all he could do to keep from plunging his hand into Porthos’ trousers to take advantage of their rare privacy.

A conspicuous throat-clearing from the edge of their camp brought him back to his senses, however, though it didn’t stop Porthos from laying a last, filthy kiss on him and growling, “Later,” in his ear. It took him a few minutes of considering the fierier parts of the book of Jeremiah before Aramis could stand and face their guide without embarrassing himself, if not her.

For her part, Arielda seemed content to pretend she hadn’t just interrupted them in the midst of an intimate moment, and she set about reviving the fire to heat up water and a handful of gritty grain, which eventually resolved itself into a nearly inedible slop they were forced, nevertheless, to consume.

Even the addition of the last of the dried apple did little to make it palatable. Still, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t had worse on campaign.

Fast broken, scant morning ablutions seen to, they packed up their meagre possessions and fell in behind Arielda, who kept a brisk pace toward the northeast, if the sun here moved in the same way it did in their own world. The path was narrow and tortuous, winding around the twisted roots of forest giants, and in places it was choked with clinging vines and thorny brambles that tore at their trousers and tried to trip them up.

The going was slow in these places, but they made steady progress, covering at least a league before the sun finally made its appearance in the sky overhead. Despite the fact that it was noon, or thereabouts, the path was still shrouded in a murky brown light, the air under the dense canopy thick and musty, catching at his throat and making him want to cough. He resisted the urge; something there was in this ancient woodland that discouraged even that much sound.

In fact, Aramis couldn’t ignore the growing sensation of being watched. As if thinking of it called it into being, a lithe, hooded figure materialized from the gloom directly in their path ahead. Just at this point, the trail was crowded in on both sides by a dense thicket of thorn-bushes that blocked their view of anything but the path immediately before and behind them.

Aramis, who was in the middle, glanced behind him to see that Porthos had turned to confront a figure blocking their retreat. Looking back at their guide, he saw that Arielda had drawn her bow and nocked an arrow, pulling the bowstring taut but aiming just to the right of the figure ahead, as if reluctant to threaten him.

Or her, as resolved to be the case when the figure took a light step forward into a rare beam of light that penetrated the cover of the trees. She was tall—taller even than Porthos—and slender, almost unnaturally so, and but for the easy way she held a drawn sword before her, Aramis might have mistaken her for sickly. Her pointed ears pierced a veil of fair hair drawn back sensibly out of the way, presumably for combat, and her grey eyes were alert, her expression grave and focused, as if daring them to make the first move.

“We carry marks of safe passage by the treaty we all share,” Arielda said, and though she spoke at a carrying volume, her words fell flat and dead against the weight of the air.

“We share nothing with _your_ kind,” the fairy woman answered as if stating an obvious fact that the three of them were clearly too stupid to grasp.

“We are guaranteed safe passage,” Arielda repeated, but she had shifted the aim of her arrow squarely into the center mass of the fairy woman’s body. At this distance, there was no chance that she might miss, yet the fairy merely laughed, a short, ugly sound that rattled carrion birds out of the trees around them.

The birds called raucously to one another and swooped so low that Aramis could hear their wings beating all around him, almost feel the movement of the air as they flew by.

A shudder worked its way up his back, and he swallowed an involuntary sound as a wave of dread washed over him. There was something wicked in the woods about them, something biding its time before striking, taking pleasure in their fear.

Behind him, Porthos cursed, and Aramis turned so that he stood in profile to both Arielda in front of him and Porthos behind. He had drawn his sword without conscious thought, a motion as natural as breathing, and he stood at the ready, waiting for the assault.

He was almost disappointed when the fairy in front of them gave them her back and said, “Come with us,” over her shoulder, as though their obedience were a foregone conclusion.

As an overwhelming urge to obey her command overtook him, Aramis realized why she was so confident in their compliance. Without intending to, he sheathed his sword and took a step to follow her.

“Damned witches,” Porthos muttered, dragging his feet as he fell in behind Aramis. Though they struggled mightily against the order to follow her, they could not seem to break free, and judging by the way Arielda, too, followed, twisting her shoulders and spitting invective in her own tongue, the half-fairy was equally affected.

In short order, they arrived at their apparent destination. Though it was made of artfully constructed wood-framed huts and disguised by lush falls of verdant foliage—some wild vine growing apparently by command over every roof peak and around every door-frame—the camp looked like a temporary bivouac, such as Aramis and Porthos had themselves occupied on many occasions.

There were perhaps twenty fairy folk in the camp, about equally divided by gender, and all carrying a preponderance of weapons.

It fairly screamed “Rebel encampment,” and Aramis began to get a glimmer of what it might be about.

They were led into the very center of the camp, near a prodigious stone fire-ring in which charred logs smoldered even now, indicating how great the fire must be to heat and light that place at night.

The tallest fairy Aramis had yet seen—at least a head and a half taller than Porthos—stood apart from the rest near the ring.

He was darker-skinned than the others, and he was the only one with silver streaks running through his long, chestnut hair. His eyes were a vivid green, his cheekbones high and sharp, his lips marred by a nasty scar that pulled one side of his mouth up toward his left eye, as though he were perpetually sneering.

Around them, the other fairy fell in, a bristling circle of evident hostility, clearly eager for any excuse to attack the three of them and hack them to pieces.

“By placing a geas on us, free travelers bearing the mark of safe passage, you have violated the Treaty of the Three Realms and will suffer a dire fate under the terms of that sacred contract,” Arielda said, evidently unfazed by the lethal display hemming them in on all sides.

The tall fairy suited his tone to his look, condescension dripping from his every syllable: “We do not recognize the sovereignty of your ‘realm.’ There is only one monarch of the Faire, and it is not that wretched creature you call ‘queen.’ She should have smothered you in your crib when you were born. We call you abomination. Outcast. Unclean thing.”

Aramis saw heat rise into Arielda’s cheeks, watched as her hands strove to reach for her bow and quiver.

“Release me from your geas, and I’ll show you what this abomination can do,” she growled through teeth clenched with effort.

The fairy laughed. It was an awful sound, and it made him feel like something vile was pouring down his throat. Aramis resisted the urge to vomit, swallowing frantically to avoid gagging. Beside him, Porthos face was twisted in a rictus grin as he likewise battled the sensation.

“Your weak parlor tricks don’t work on me, Uncle,” Arielda said, and it seemed to be true. Instead of tensing up at his laugh, she had seemed to relax, her shoulders easing into a posture of supreme confidence. She held her head up and looked him directly in the eyes.

“Surely kin such as we should not resort to such nonsense, Ananias. Let us meet on equal terms, you and I, for the sake of our shared blood.”

His ruined lip curled scornfully, until his face was an ugly wreck.

“I do not recognize our kinship, nor will any of your kind ever be my equal. It is because of creatures like you that we act as we do.”

Aramis may not have understood the details of Ananias’ cause, but he recognized a fanatic when he heard one, and he felt a sinking in his gut at the realization. Politicians could be swayed; zealots were impervious to most persuasions.

“Your brother did not see things as you do. He was happy enough to make a trade alliance with Queen Maven and seal that alliance in the _traditional_ way.” Arielda managed to imply a wealth of filthy secrets in that simple observation.

Ananias’ complexion paled and a vein at his temple throbbed visibly. Aramis felt that they were moments from annihilation.

“Kayin was my _half_ -brother. He did not inherit his perversions from our father.”

“No, but you certainly got your looks from your mother,” she answered, a vicious smile playing on her face.

Against Aramis’ expectations of imminent bloodshed, Ananias’ merely smiled and stroked the twisted flesh that made him hideous. “And you got from your mother a sense of entitlement out of all proportion with your breeding.”

Arielda raised her chin. “My mother is a queen and my father is a prince of your royal family. My breeding demands that you kneel before me, you foresworn, traitorous pig.” She spat, a perfect, glistening globule that struck Ananias’ booted foot and slid slowly into the dirt at his feet.

Ananias did not so much as flinch, instead treating them to another of those oily, stomach-churning laughs. This time, Aramis could not resist the nauseating wave that surged from his gut, nor could he swallow the burning bile that flooded his mouth.

As one, the two Musketeers bent double and spewed hot yellow bile across the neatly swept stones of the ring.

The fairy laughed again, and Aramis clutched his stomach and dropped to his knees, heaving uselessly against an empty stomach, strings of saliva pink with blood chaining him to the dirt just inches from his face.

“Stop,” he breathed in a moment’s lull between purgings. “Please.”

Ananias fell silent, and Aramis took a breath, dashing the tears from his eyes and wiping his running nose on the back of his hand. He squinted up at Arielda, who appeared unaffected by Ananias’ efforts.

“They will puke until their stomachs burst,” he promised Arielda. “And then what will you tell your mother? What of her precious plans to prevent war?”

At last, his words got a reaction from their guide. Arielda jerked, apparently startled by something he’d said, and Ananias gave a dismissive snort and shook his head.

“Such a fool for one so ‘well-born.’ The queen tells you nothing, does she? You’re nothing but a pawn, to be used up and thrown away at her convenience. So much for your pretensions of nobility. You’re as much a monster to her as you are to us.”

He turned away, saying, “Bind them,” over his shoulder before disappearing into the largest of the huts in the camp.

Though they put up some resistance, they were soon disarmed, bound with leather thongs tightened painfully around their wrists, and then marched into a low, dark hut, forced to kneel, and then bound too at the ankles. It was uncomfortable already, and Aramis resigned himself to a long period of suffering.

“No talking,” one of their captors ordered before she stationed one guard inside the doorway and another out. They were taking no chances on the three of them getting away.

After recognizing the futility of trying to free himself, Aramis turned his mind to the argument he’d just heard, trying to reconcile the revelation that Arielda was Queen Maven’s daughter—and somehow also Ananias’ half-niece—with her behavior back at the goblin camp, where she had identified herself—and been treated like—a third-rank guard: hardly fitting duty for a princess.

The fact that they were still alive despite Ananias’ fanatical disdain for non-fairy folk suggested that he was more sensitive to Arielda’s status than he had admitted.

Or he had something truly unpleasant planned for them.

Sighing aloud, he spared a glance for Porthos, whose face was a stoic mask. He had to already be feeling the discomfort of being so bound, but even so, he managed a wink, exaggerated to the point of being ridiculous, and Aramis couldn’t help but grin back, communicating silently in the way they had.

Come what may, no matter the pain of their current situation, Aramis knew that his brother would be strategizing an escape: recalling the layout of the camp, cataloguing the number and weapons of the enemy, and calculating likely weak points.

At the first chance they had—and such a chance would come—they would free themselves and repay their current discomfort in spades.

*****

Jean-Marie complained of weakness the next morning, so they left him in Feverfew’s capable hands and with an extra guard on the exterior door, and moved swiftly through the labyrinthine corridors of the vast palace built into the trunk and along the branches of the Mother Tree. Many of the hallways were open-air, with pergola-like arches at intervals over the walkways and delicately curved railings that seemed more decorative than secure.

Athos kept to the center of the hallways when he could. Now and then, they would duck through a tall, arched doorway and onto a set of tightly spiraling stairs obviously carved into the trunk itself.

Eventually, they came out into a wide hall roofed in a living green canopy of leaves and flanked on each end by a set of double doors, with inlaid mosaics depicting what Athos assumed were famous fairy tales: Here, a slender youth battled a dragon; there, a mass of lithe figures gave challenge to little green-skinned monsters with pointed teeth and crude weapons. The room was empty except for one figure, a fact that surprised Athos.

Given the opposition, he had been expecting, well, _opposition_.

Halfway down the room on the west side, writing table and chair bathed in morning sun from skylights craftily woven into the branches above, sat a fairy older than Feverfew, with long white hair, pale blue eyes, and the harried air of court functionaries everywhere.

Even before his perfunctory, “State your business,” Athos knew exactly how to treat this particular sort of man, and with a deep bow and a humble mien, he did as he was told.

“I am Athos, Comte de la Fère, of the human realm, here to claim rights as a suitor of d’Artagnan, known in the Faire as Cainson. I am prepared to face all challenges for Cainson’s hand in marriage and plight my troth on this, the fourth day of the third week of the Green month, in this year of the Lord and Lady 4711, common calendar.” (d’Artagnan had filled him in on the date only moments before they’d entered the hall.)

If the Recorder of Contests was surprised to hear a human making this declaration, he hardly showed it, writing busily on a scroll of fine vellum and otherwise ignoring Athos and d’Artagnan.

Of course, he’d already heard Jean-Marie’s pledge, so perhaps that took some of the novelty out of the experience for him.

When he finished writing, the fairy intoned in a bored voice: “I, Strix, Recorder of Contests at the Court of Queen Serei, do witness the declaration of one Athos, Comte de la Fère, whose name shall be officially recorded unless there be witnesses bearing reasonable testimony against his just claim to this right.”

As he slid the vellum forward, presumably for Athos’ signature, one of the great doors at the far end of the court opened on oiled hinges and a troop of fae marched in, led by a fair-haired, slender creature so willowy as to be almost androgynous. If not for the notable bulge of his manhood made obvious by the tight leather leggings he wore, Athos would not have been sure.

“I object to the human’s claim,” this fairy said, in a high, lilting voice, moving to stand somewhat too close to Athos for comfort. Beside him, d’Artagnan tensed, his hand moving to the hilt of his sword, but the fairy who had spoken looked merely amused, not alarmed, by this gesture.

Tossing his almost colorless hair over his shoulders, he leveled icy blue eyes on Strix and said, “He’s human. Therefore, our laws do not apply to him, and he cannot compete for Cainson’s hand.”

Strix glared up at him, clearly unimpressed by his claim or by the milling crowd of strutting peacocks he’d brought in tow. A single comprehensive look at the crew had told Athos all he needed to: He’d seen courtiers of their sort a thousand times back home. They were all crow and no cock. He had nothing to fear from them.

“As you would know if you bothered to read the daily records of this office, Pavo, precedent has already been set for an exception to contest law. Jean-Marie de Batz de Castelmore, of the human realm, has been recognized and duly recorded as an official suitor of Cainson. So, too, may Athos, Comte de la Fère, be recognized, and so he shall. You have no legal justification for interfering in this business.”

“Going soft for the animal kingdom now, Strix,” Pavo mocked.

But Strix would not be baited. “The law is the law, Pavo. Should you wish to make an official complaint, you must go to the Recorder of Complaints and Suits. You have one passage of the moon to do so or your claim will be null and void. Good day.”

Rarely had Athos seen such a deft combination of officiousness and self-importance, but right then, he could have kissed Strix for his pedantry. For his part, Pavo looked supremely put out, his lips twisting into a sour moue.

Turning his attention to d’Artagnan, he looked him up and down, dragging his eyes with provocative deliberation over every part of him. Athos was tempted to put himself in the way of that stare, but he held his temper, knowing that that was what Pavo wanted him to do.

When he was finished leering, he leaned toward d’Artagnan, and as Athos tightened his own hand on his sword grip, he whispered, “You like them dirty and rough, don’t you? I’ve got a pack of hunting dogs that would suit you just as well and not expect you to be kind to them in the morning.”

Pavo’s witless followers broke into gales of nasty laughter, but though the color rose high in d’Artagnan’s cheeks, he did not respond to the provocation, merely turning to Strix instead and saying in a somewhat strangled voice, “May we sign now and be done with this?”

Strix nodded, offering Athos the quill.

As he was blowing on the ink to dry it, Athos heard the door at the far end open once more and saw, with a sinking heart, that it was Raven with his own crowd of followers.

Irritation pinched the features of the Recorder of Contests, but he was civil enough when he said, “Lord Raven, how can I assist you this morning?”

“I come to make the right of first claim in the Contest for Cainson, Recorder Strix.”

The older fairy bowed once in acquiescence and retrieved a second piece of rolled vellum from a basket at his elbow. Pavo and his crew fell back from the table as Raven’s men fell in around d’Artagnan and Athos in a close semi-circle.

Athos admired their professional soldiery even as he had to mask his annoyance. There was no reason for them to flex their muscles, as it were. Athos was playing by their rules, after all.

So, apparently, was Raven, who said, “I claim the right to set the date and time of the First Contest.”

“Yes?” Strix said, wetted pen nib hovering over the clean vellum. His tone was back to its perfunctory best, and Athos got a childish pleasure out of knowing that to this particular functionary, all those seeking his services were equally irritating.

“Sunset this evening.”

There was a ripple of murmurs from Pavo’s men, but Raven’s stood stone-faced, wearing identical thousand-yard stares.

Beside him, d’Artagnan made a noise of protest, and Athos gave him a questioning look.

Strix punctuated the record with a staccato tap at the end of his final sentence and then spoke in a carrying monotone: “Nature of contest to be determined by right of second claimant.”

Then, with a bare twinkle of mischief in his pale eyes, he looked up through his lashes at Athos and said, “The early birds get the worm.”

Evidently, Athos, as third suitor, had no say in any of the contests’ proceedings.

Just as Athos was wondering what foolishness Jean-Marie would have them up to, the man himself appeared through the door through which Athos and d’Artagnan had come.

Trailed by one of the extra door guards d’Artagnan had left, Jean-Marie wore an expression of stifled suffering on his pale face, and he leaned rather heavily on Feverfew’s arm. The physician’s look of professional patience suggested that he had no alarm over the condition of the young man in his charge, and far from apologizing for “allowing” him to roam, he turned him over cheerfully to d’Artagnan’s care.

“He’ll be right as rain in an hour or two. Give him a good breakfast, a nice stiff tea, and he’ll be well.” Then, with nary a backward glance at the motley menagerie muddling up the room, the physician bustled back the way he’d come.

For his part, d’Artagnan looked a little flustered to find himself with an armful of young man.

Jean-Marie seemed to recollect himself when he noticed that there was a rather larger audience than he might have been expecting, and Athos smothered the urge to roll his eyes mightily at Jean-Marie’s“miraculous” return to strength.

He pulled away from d’Artagnan, straightened up, and put on the haughty expression of a born nobleman as he said, “I claim second rights.”

Strix’s mouth had tightened into a thin white line at yet another intrusion on his orderly morning routine, and he made a barely polite gesture indicating that Jean-Marie should dispense with formalities and get on with things.

He once again unrolled the vellum on which he had noted Raven’s claim and waited with his pen nib poised above the scroll. “Date and time are set for sunset this evening,” he noted rather impatiently as Jean-Marie hung fire.

Apparently startled to discover that he was going to be responsible for determining the nature rather than the time of the contest, Jean-Marie hesitated.

Athos was tempted to offer a suggestion but thought better of it when he caught the eager expressions on Pavo and his people: They were hoping for some drama among the humans, Athos thought, and he’d be damned if he’d give them the satisfaction.

“Let it be a contest of wits,” Jean-Marie offered at last, and though he sounded confident enough, Athos thought he could detect some uncertainty. When he caught Athos looking at him, Jean-Marie arched an eyebrow and curled his lip, as if to suggest what he thought of Athos’ chances in the intellectual arena.

“A contest of wits as determined by rule of law,” Strix repeated formally, writing something down on the vellum. He looked up at last, said, “Details will be decided by the appropriate authorities and will be communicated to you via messenger no later than three hours before the time at which the First Contest will commence.”

Then he sat, ramrod straight, eyes fierce with ignoring them all, until Pavo’s group broke for the far doors and Raven’s men turned as a unit and fell into a perfect formation behind their leader.

d’Artagnan and his two human suitors made a rather less impressive exit out the door and down the stairs up which they’d come, and though he had been taking pains to observe the circuitous route they took there and back, Athos was still unclear where the Recorder of Contests’ hall was in relation to d’Artagnan’s suite of rooms. An offhanded thought occurred to him that he would need a trustworthy guide to get him to and from the site chosen for the First Contest, but he kept that observation to himself for the meanwhile.

d’Artagnan looked distressed, and time and distance from the hall did nothing to lessen his apparent upset.

When they were at last in the relative privacy of his rooms, he helped Jean-Marie rather mechanically to a seat at the table and then walked to the sideboard, where he paused, staring at the decanters, before pacing over to the windows and staring out of them instead.

“This is a disaster,” he said at last, still showing them his back.

Athos had taken the liberty of relaying a breakfast order to one of the guards, who had seemed perplexed by Athos’ request until Athos reminded him that he was a guest of the prince and should, therefore, be accorded certain perquisites.

He had just taken the other seat at the table when d’Artagnan made his pronouncement. “I’m glad you have so much faith in us,” he answered, letting amusement and fondness temper his words.

d’Artagnan spun around. “That isn’t funny,” he said, his face ashen and strained.

“You’d prefer I’d have chosen combat, I suppose, so your Musketeer could prevail.” At any other time, such a tone would have earned him an automatic challenge, but Athos had gauged d’Artagnan’s mood and recognized it for what it was: desperation. He bided his time, saying nothing.

“He’s meant to prevail in any case, remember? It’s what we agreed on.”

Jean-Marie crossed his arms over his chest and flounced back in his chair, a sullen anger clouding his eyes.

“Did you really do this because you thought you could win? You thought Athos was too stupid to beat you in a match of wits? Have you any idea what you’ve done?”

“I’ve leveled the playing field,” Jean-Marie cried, dropping his arms and leaning forward in his chair, one finger thrusting rudely in Athos’ direction. “Just because I’m not an expert swordsman doesn’t mean I don’t have other gifts. You used to say my intellect aroused you, d’Artagnan, remember?”

Athos would have doubted it was possible for d’Artagnan to pale further, but at Jean Marie’s remark, he lost yet more color, until his skin resembled the cold clay of a corpse. He staggered back a half-step, caught himself, and shook his head as if to clear it from a ringing blow.

“You fool. You little fool. In your pride you’ve damned us all.”

Across the table, Jean-Marie floundered, paling and then flushing as anger and humiliation colored his cheeks. Athos watched him scan d’Artagnan’s face, trying to understand what it is he’d done to rate so much sudden anger.

At last, Athos took pity on the boy, who was pathetically overmatched.

“d’Artagnan, why is it you believe a match of wits will be so dire for us? Surely you must have some faith that we can outwit Raven.”

d’Artagnan shook his head. “Were this our world, of course, yes, but we are not in our world, Athos. This isn’t to be a game of children’s riddles. Think, Athos! What is it that fairy tales always warn against?”

“Don’t follow the fairy lights into the marsh?”

d’Artagnan nodded frantically. “And?”

“Don’t make a bargain with the fairy folk. Don’t take them at their word. Don’t accept hospitality from them or offer gratitude for a perceived kindness. Don’t—.”

“Don’t trust them as far as you can throw them. They’re masters of deceiving without lying outright, of half-truths and obfuscation by omission. Their battles of wit are legendary—literally! There are bardic songs six hours long detailing epic struggles of matched wits. Even the most ill-educated fairy is better prepared for such a contest than you are.”

“Ah,” said Athos, having no better rejoinder. Now that he understood the nature of Jean-Marie’s blunder, he began to see how this evening’s First Contest might be their last.

“How many contests must we undertake before a winner is declared?”

d’Artagnan seemed to gather himself together. “The first suitor to win two contests wins the right to my hand.”

“Then even if we fail tonight, we aren’t doomed entire. I wasn’t wrong when I said that you need to have a little more faith in me.”

d’Artagnan had reclaimed some of his calm and gave Athos the smallest of smiles. As if Jean-Marie were not sulking mere feet from them, d’Artagnan came up beside where Athos was sitting to rest his hand on Athos’ shoulder and squeeze a little to acknowledge the rightness of Athos’ words.

“Forgive me,” d’Artagnan said. “I should not have despaired.”

“That’s right, you shouldn’t have,” Athos said heartily, rising at a knock at the door. As he moved to let in the porter delivering their breakfast, he said, “There will be time enough for desperate measures tomorrow. For now, let’s eat, drink, and be merry.”

As plans went, it wasn’t the worst one he’d had.

*****

In retrospect, he should have had a better plan.

Or any, really.

But guarded as they were and prevented from communicating, Aramis couldn’t very well seek input from his fellow captives, and soon the discomfort of his bonds and his physical position began to intrude unavoidably on his thoughts.

Thigh muscles and shoulder joints screaming in agony, neck beginning to twinge, and with an incipient headache taking up room behind his right eye, it was all Aramis could do not to betray his pain. He shifted as best he could, trying to relieve the strain on his legs and then his shoulders, but to no avail: The position in which they’d been bound was deliberately cruel. They were being softened up for something.

By the time they were hauled from the dark hut, his feet were numb, he needed help standing up, and his bladder was threatening to humiliate him in front of the whole of the rebel “army.”

Ananias was standing with a smug expression beside the fire once more, this time holding a rolled parchment, its green wax seal broken.

“I was struggling to find the perfect punishment for your trespass,” he began as they were dragged into the clear space between him and the rest of his group. “When what should fortune deliver me but this news.” He waved the scroll languidly in one hand, his unattractive smirk growing uglier as the scar pulled at his upper lip.

“Release them and see that they arrive at Ebenhome unharmed and without further delay,” he ordered their fairy guards, and as their bonds were cut and they rubbed life back into their tingling hands and stomped the ground to likewise revive their deadened feet and aching legs, he added, “I’ll provide you an escort to see that you have no trouble. Here are your provisions. Your weapons will be returned to you when you reach the outer wards of the village.”

“Why are you letting us go?” Aramis asked, suspicious of this sudden change in their fortune and in Ananias’ attitude, which bordered on gloating.

“Yeah, what’s in it for you?” Porthos added.

Arielda hissed under her breath, “Leave it,” and shouldered her pack, indicating that they should take their things from the other guards and be on their way.

Ordinarily, Aramis would have made discretion the better part of valor, but something stank to high heaven here, and he was tired of being an unwitting pawn in a game to which he didn’t even know the rules, never mind what constituted winning.

“No, I don’t think we shall ‘leave it,’” he said, adopting the tone of a courtier who has seated himself firmly on his high horse. “I think we’ll have the truth out of you before we go.”

Ananias narrowed his eyes at them, his face losing some of its self-satisfied amusement.

“I owe you nothing.”

Aramis shrugged, as if to suggest that Ananias’ assertion was arguable, and then said, “But you do want something from us.”

The tall fairy grimaced as though he’d just swallowed a bug, but he didn’t deny Aramis’ point.

“If you want us to go to this ‘Ebenhome,’ you’d best tell us why, or we will make sure that we do _not_ arrive.”

“We’re contrary like that,” Porthos added. He was wearing the pirate’s grin Aramis found so attractive, and he felt his heart kick behind his ribs at the look.

Ananias considered them for a long moment, still wearing the insect-eating expression, and then seemed to accept their point, albeit with ill grace.

“The Queen of the Faire wishes her nephew, a half-breed bastard, to carry on her line, thereby ensuring that the Treaty of the Three remains inviolate for at least another generation or two. In order to be considered her legitimate successor, he must marry one of the three suitors who have made a claim to his hand. Two of those suitors are human.”

Aramis caught Porthos’ reaction out of the corner of his eye. It could have been no less electric than his own sudden shock of realization: The two human suitors must be Athos and d’Artagnan! Leave it to those two to involve themselves in a battle for succession.

Ananias offered a sardonic dip of his chin, indicating that they seemed to have caught on.

“As I’ve already indicated, my people do not recognize the Treaty and wish to return to a more natural state of relations between the Fair Folk and the lesser races. Therefore, you will travel to Ebenhome, disrupt the Contest, and prevent the nephew from claiming the right to rule.”

He looked at Porthos, who was returning the same knowing expression he himself wore. Of course they’d go to Ebenhome, since that suited their purpose of rescuing Athos and d’Artagnan, but whether they’d stop their friends from claiming the nephew’s hand was a different story entirely, a story the details of which they did not have.

Of course, all the two Musketeers said to Ananias was, “Well, why didn’t you just say so to begin with,” in a rather annoying unison that drove a choked sound of impatience out of the fairy.

They were hustled out of the camp without another word, one rebel fairy leading and another bringing up the rear. Aramis would have liked to have a little time to rest, revive themselves with wine and food, and discuss what they’d learned with Arielda, but as a soldier he was used to getting only what someone else required, so he fell into a drudging march rhythm and tried not to think about his aching thighs, sore shoulders, and the driving pain that pulsed behind his eye with every heartbeat and made his stomach roil and heave.

“You alright?” Porthos asked, turning to look over his shoulder as they walked.

“Never better,” he lied fluently, knowing that Porthos would hear what he actually meant. “You?”

“This place is a constant delight,” Porthos answered in kind.

Despite his condition, Aramis couldn’t help but smile.

*****

It hadn’t been the best plan to return to d’Artagnan’s rooms. What had seemed a spacious suite grew cramped and claustrophobic with three nervous men pacing its confines, and Athos at last surrendered to his desire for wine, pouring himself a cup and slumping into a seat at the table.

“Really?” d’Artagnan said, eyeing Athos’ beverage askance. “You think drinking now is a good idea?”

“I think it’s a damned sight better idea than trying to memorize four thousand years’ worth of alien customs, laws, and social mores,” Athos answered, bringing the cup to his mouth and taking a long, pointed swallow.

From the bedroom doorway, Jean-Marie gave a disdainful snort. “Where’s the vaunted Musketeer courage now, eh? Deserted you already, has it? Escaping into the cups?”

The boy had grown fractious and then puerile as the morning had worn into afternoon and still no messenger had arrived with the details of the First Contest.

Athos was hard-pressed to find anything redeeming about the spoiled wretch, who seemed to possess all of a typical nobleman’s worst attributes and a good helping of extra entitlement besides. But he knew he was being unfair, that Jean-Marie was hardly a seasoned warrior, prepared to face battle (of whatever sort) with equanimity.

He’d been thrust into completely alien circumstances with precious few resources and only a reliance on a nostalgic past relationship to keep him safe under d’Artagnan’s care.

Athos could have told the boy that d’Artagnan would have protected him even had he been a total stranger, but he didn’t feel magnanimous enough to broker a peace between the two. A small, ignominious part of him had to admit to finding some satisfaction in watching d’Artagnan’s good nature worn away to a brittle, transparent patina with every eroding drop of acid from Jean-Marie’s ugly tongue.

So he didn’t rise to Jean-Marie’s rude challenge but simply tipped his wine cup in a mock-salute and took another draught.

“That’s enough!” d’Artagnan snapped, rounding on Jean-Marie, who took an uncertain step backward.

“You’ve been nothing but rude to Athos, who has, after all, done everything he can to try to help.”

“Oh, yes, remind me again of how selfless and helpful your precious Musketeer is,” Jean-Marie sneered, apparently forgetting self-preservation in his effort to belittle Athos in d’Artagnan’s eyes. “He’s got as much reason to want to win this contest as I do!”

That brought d’Artagnan up short—literally. He had stopped in mid-step, coming down gracelessly wrong-footed, and stumbled a little into the edge of the table before catching himself. He looked from Jean-Marie to Athos and back again, mouth slightly agape as though astonished at what he discovered in that survey.

Athos opened his hand around the stem of his cup, as if to say, _This one’s all yours._

With a confused shake of his head, d’Artagnan fixed his eyes on Jean-Marie.

“Do you mean to say that you feel that your claim is equal to Athos’?”

It was as though only then had Jean-Marie fully grasped what he’d been betraying with his behavior that day. His face fell, skin growing pale, and he looked all at once like an overgrown child.

“I thought…” he began, hands moving helplessly as he tried to articulate his feelings. “That is to say, we were—” He took a deep breath, gathering himself, shoulders straightening and chin coming up to look d’Artagnan directly in the eyes.

“I have the prior claim to your affections, d’Artagnan. I claim the right of the first, no matter what Raven believes. You and I have been lovers, d’Artagnan. We have been… _everything_.”

Such painful earnestness was hard to witness, and Athos rose from the table soundlessly and retreated to the point in the room farthest from the bedroom door. It was merely a nominal privacy, of course, and he could hear every word, though he tried to ignore them, an ultimate impossibility.

“Jean-Marie…” Athos’ heart clenched at the pain in d’Artagnan’s voice. He sounded so young. Athos could barely remember a time when he himself had still had innocence to lose.

“Never mind,” Jean-Marie said, fear in his voice, perhaps having realized he was driving d’Artagnan to some irrevocable declaration. “I’m tired. After yesterday…”

But d’Artagnan was having none of Jean-Marie’s excuses this time. Beneath the sorrow in his voice there was steel.

“What we had is in the past, Jean-Marie. It was years ago. You and I were different people then.”

“Yes,” Jean-Marie interrupted, tone gone cutting and cruel. “I was a virgin and an innocent.”

“As we both were,” d’Artagnan reminded him gently.

“But you took a gift from me and then spent it elsewhere,” and Athos could feel the scorching heat of the young man’s eyes on his back. “Whereas your gift to me was ruined— _I_ was ruined!”

            “What Beaumont did to you was awful and wrong, but you are not ruined, Jean-Marie.”

Athos had heard them allude before to something terrible in the past the two young men shared, but only now did he start to understand its exact nature, and he felt a wash of ice down his back and the cold, heavy weight of understanding settled in his belly, pressing against his heart and making him shiver.

“Yes, I am! I _am_ , d’Artagnan. Why do you think I go every year to the gypsies? They’re the only ones who understand what I’ve become. And Ramilda promised there was a cure, if only I would go with them to the grove and—”

At the import of his words, Athos had spun around. Jean-Marie stood like a pale statue, stricken to stillness by what he’d revealed. d’Artagnan was still beside the table, his hand frozen in the act of raising a cup to his lips.

“What did you say?” d’Artagnan whispered, the hand holding the cup shaking as he set it down.

“It’s not what you think,” Jean-Marie stammered, eyes white with fear, hands up as if to ward off a blow. “I didn’t know they’d bring you here. How could I know that? Ramilda had promised for years that she would cure me of the nightmares and the—the other things. She said it would be this year that I’d be changed at last, _purified_ , she called it. You don’t know what it was like, all these years, forced to get on my knees for that bastard, to suck him and drool on his boots and be his _catamite_. You can’t know!”

But for as horrific a picture as Jean-Marie’s last words drew, it was his earlier statement that caught Athos’ attention.

They must have forgotten his presence, for when Athos spoke, both of them started like nervous horses at moving shadows.

“The gypsy woman, Ramilda, she led you here with the promise that she would heal your suffering?”

Jean-Marie nodded frenetically, head bobbing loose on his neck, as though he’d lost control of his muscles.

“And you knew that d’Artagnan would be drawn here by your actions?”

Misery casting his features in a greenish, unflattering pallor, Jean-Marie nodded.

“She pr-promised we’d be t-together.” And now tears had started, making twin cold tracks down his cheeks.

“And so you are,” murmured Athos, not to be cruel but because it had to be said.

d’Artagnan, who throughout the storm of revelations had stood motionless by the table, moved suddenly, batting his cup violently from the table until it crashed against the door.

Almost immediately, that door opened, and a guard poked his head in, but with a gesture and head-shake from Athos, he quietly withdrew, and Athos moved up beside d’Artagnan, risking a light touch to his shoulder, as much to ground the young man as to remind him of his presence there at his side, where he belonged.

“The boy couldn’t have known the whole sorry tale,” Athos surprised them all by saying. He didn’t like Jean-Marie, but he understood more, now, he thought, than he had before of what drove him to be so insufferable. And after all, hadn’t he learned that mercy in the face of destruction was sometimes the better argument?

Jean-Marie fastened desperately to Athos’ words.

“I didn’t, d’Artagnan, I swear it. I had no idea about this place or about who you were or anything else. All Ramilda told me was that you and I would be reunited and that I’d be free at last from this weight of…filth…that clogs my soul.”

“They used him,” Athos said simply, guiding d’Artagnan by a hand on his arm to sit at the table. He staggered into more than sat down in the chair, propped his elbows on the table, and dropped his head into his hands.

“d’Artagnan…” Jean-Marie began, but Athos signaled him to stop, to wait, and at last the young man disappeared into the bedroom, closing the door behind him.

“I’m sorry,” d’Artagnan said at last, after Athos had retrieved the cup from the floor and righted it next to his own on the table, filling them generously and nudging d’Artagnan’s toward him.

“For wasting good wine?” Athos kept his voice low, tone light.

“For dragging you into this mess,” he started, raising his head to look on Athos with abject misery in his handsome face.

“As if you could have kept me from it. It’s our job to follow each other into danger, remember?” He’d hoped that reminding d’Artagnan of the Musketeers would lend him the confidence that Jean-Marie’s confession seemed to have robbed him of, but instead it caused d’Artagnan to drop his gaze once more.

“I don’t deserve your fellowship.”

Athos waited, sensing that this was an explanation d’Artagnan would have to offer at his own pace.

“I told you that the night Jean-Marie and I were to be together for the first time Beaumont caught us.”

“Yes,” Athos murmured, clenching his teeth against the urge to tell d’Artagnan he needn’t go on. It was clear that d’Artagnan did need to tell the story, ugly as it was. The least Athos could do was bear silent witness.

“Of course, he’d known for some time. He threatened immediately to take us to the Comte. I could have borne it—the likely beating, being sent home in disgrace, my name a curse in people’s mouths. My father wouldn’t have been happy, but he wouldn’t have disowned me, either, I don’t think. But, well, you’ve met the Comte de Castelmore.”

Athos didn’t need to respond this time. d’Artagnan wasn’t really asking him a question. In fact, he wasn’t really in the room with him at all. By his tone and the distant expression on his face, it was clear that he was trapped in his memories of the past.

“Jean-Marie begged him not to, said he’d give him anything.”

d’Artagnan gave a hollow, broken little laugh at that, and Athos couldn’t resist his need to reach across the table and grasp his hand where it lay, palm down, against the table.

d’Artagnan didn’t return the touch but neither did he reject it. He plunged on, words tumbling faster now as he neared the terrible thing that had happened and which had led them all to this place and time together.

“It’s obvious that’s what Beaumont had been waiting to hear. He got this awful, gleeful leer, and I told Jean-Marie not to do it, told him we’d go to his father together and tell him we were in love, or we’d run away together, find some small village where we could ply a trade, but he wasn’t listening to me. He couldn’t even see me, I don’t think. His eyes were fixed on Beaumont as his savior, Beaumont, that evil, wretched monster!”

d’Artagnan’s shoulders were heaving with the effort of expelling his words, and there were tears running unheeded down his cheeks. Athos increased the pressure of his hand where it held d’Artagnan’s unresponsive one, and swallowed back the bitter bile that was threatening to choke him.

“He hadn’t even given us time to dress. We were still—I was in my shirt, but Jean-Marie was naked. He was shaking. He looked so young.”

“You both were,” Athos said, but d’Artagnan’s eyes were blind to him, ears closed to anything but the remembered encounter he was reliving.

“Beaumont reached for his belt, and Jean-Marie flinched. I think he thought Beaumont meant to beat him with it. And Jean-Marie would have let him. He’d have—.”

d’Artagnan’s words caught in his throat and he coughed, reached for the cup, drained it in one swift draught, and then missed the edge of the table setting it down. It clattered away somewhere beneath their feet, unnoticed.

“You know the rest.”

“I can guess,” Athos murmured, but he thought the lancing was not done, that there was poison yet to be flensed from this festering wound.

“He—Beaumont made Jean-Marie t-touch him and suck him. He made me watch. Said if I ran then it would go worse for Jean-Marie. We hadn’t—Jean-Marie and I hadn’t finished, you know. We hadn’t come to completion but were still joined when… . Beaumont took that from Jean-Marie, there in the bower that was supposed to have been our loving place. He took it while I watched and did nothing. And then, when he was done, Jean-Marie’s blood still wet on him, he got up, put himself away, and banished me from the place. Wouldn’t even let me go to Jean-Marie, to help him or to say goodbye. He said if I was ever caught in Castelmore again, things would go worse for Jean-Marie.”

Athos had kept his eyes on d’Artagnan’s face and saw the moment he returned to the present out of the awful past.

“I left him there, Athos. I abandoned him. He can’t be blamed for what he’s done to try to survive it. It’s my fault. I was the one who wanted him, who took him to the woods. And I was the one who left him there, naked and bloody.”

“But you weren’t to blame for what Beaumont did. The rape is not your fault, nor is Beaumont’s abuse any of yours to blame. And if I understand you both aright, it was a mutual love you were sharing in those woods. There’s nothing of the predator in you.”

“But plenty of the coward,” d’Artagnan cried, wrenching his hand from beneath Athos’ and rising from the table so explosively that the chair tipped back and clattered against the floor.

Again, a guard poked his head in, and once more Athos dismissed him out with a quelling look.

Athos knew better than to argue with d’Artagnan in direct terms when he was in such a mood. Instead, he said, quietly, “Tell me, what would have happened had you defied Beaumont’s injunction and stayed?”

“I could have helped Jean-Marie. I could have protected him!”

“How? How would you have so much been allowed near him once Beaumont reported to his master what he had seen: The innocent Jean-Marie ravished by his tutor, left bleeding and humiliated in the forest. Do you honestly think your version of events would have been believed over Beaumont’s?”

“Jean-Marie would have told the truth!”

“And would the Comte de Castelmore that you and I know have believed his son? The son he felt was too soft and overly interested in women’s pursuits like flowers and herbs? The son who needed lessons in manhood?”

d’Artagnan stopped the desperate pacing he’d been doing and stared at Athos.

“I should have killed Beaumont that night.”

And there was the shame burning a black hole in d’Artagnan’s heart, where all the joy of his life leaked away.

“And how would you have explained it? At best, you’d have been a fugitive from the law for the rest of your life. At worst, you’d have been hanged with a bit of rough justice in the Comte’s courtyard at dawn.”

“He raped Jean-Marie, Athos. For _years_.”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“I didn’t _want_ to know,” d’Artagnan corrected, all the bitterness drained to weary, awful resignation in his voice. He had aged by a score of years, back bent, face colorless, eyes dull and fixed on an interminable future of living with what he now knew.

Athos understood that there was nothing more he could do or say now to ease d’Artagnan’s anguish. It would take time to heal the wounds laid bare by that evening’s revelations.

Time they didn’t have.

This time, the guard’s appearance was preceded by a preemptory knock, and then a courier entered bearing three parchment scrolls sealed in wax, addressed to Athos, Jean-Marie, and Cainson, respectively.

Athos opened his while d’Artagnan gathered his tattered composure and went to knock gently on the bedroom door to summon Jean-Marie.

What he read made Athos curse and stare hard at the courier, who blanched and backed away.

“One hour?”

The courier raised his hands helplessly.

“How long did it take you to deliver these?”

“Sir,” stammered the courier, a young male of the serving class—goblins, d’Artagnan had called them— “I was told to take the long way to the Prince’s quarters.”

“By whom?”

“Sir, I cannot say.”

“Cannot?” growled Athos menacingly, moving his hand to his sword hilt. Behind the courier, the guard likewise reached for his own, sensing trouble. “Or will not?”

“C-cannot, sir. Please!” His hands were before his face now, and he was crouched behind their meager protection, begging.

“Leave him alone, Athos,” d’Artagnan said wearily from the bedroom door, where he leaned against the limn, his own scroll dangling, open, from his fingers. “He’s not to blame.”

Athos gave him a look, just a raised eyebrow but a speaking one, that indicated perhaps d’Artagnan should pay closer attention to his own advice. This, d’Artagnan waved away with a weary gesture.

“We’d best be going,” he said to Athos and to Jean-Marie, who was a shadow at d’Artagnan’s back. “The Hall of the Ancestors is some distance from these rooms, and I suspect there may be detours between here and there.”

Though the wound was there in the deep shadows in his eyes, d’Artagnan was all Musketeer as he gave his command, assuming, for the moment, an authority over Athos that was only proper in light of their reversed positions in the Faire.

Later, Athos would see what he could do about helping to heal that wound, but for now, he had a more pressing—and likely easier—task: defeat a fairy at his own infamous game and win the hand of the man he loved.

*****

The thinning of the trees signaled their approach to the Fair Folk’s central village, Ebenhome, and there, with an unceremonious shove between the shoulder blades, they were abandoned by their rebel fairy guards, who dropped their weapons on the grass as they turned away.

Arielda paused to watch them disappear back into the shadows of the forest. “We’ll have to hurry. The Contest may already have begun.”

“Wait,” Aramis said. She did not. So he and Porthos found a downed tree, removed their packs, and sat, taking out the dried meat, fruit, and hard bread that they’d packed in the Goblin village. Porthos offered Aramis a skin of water, and Aramis gave Porthos one of his dried apples.

After a loud huff of frustration, Arielda crossed to where they sat. “What are you doing? We haven’t time for this!”

“Well, make time,” Porthos said through a mouthful of bread and water. “We need to eat.”

Aramis merely gave her a smile without opening his mouth, which was full of strips of dried meat that tasted like venison.

“You need to save your friends!”

“Athos and d’Artagnan? They can hold their own,” Aramis observed, supremely unconcerned at the moment with any of their guide’s truculent fussing.

She snorted, a surprisingly unladylike sound, and threw up her hands. “You’re fools, every one of you. Try to do a human a good turn, and this is what you get: foolishness!”

Aramis was struck by the vehemence of her protest, and he paused in his eating to look at her.

“Oh, have I gotten your attention?” she asked, rather more sarcastically than he felt was strictly necessary. “Your friend, d’Artagnan is it?”

They nodded.

“He’s the queen’s nephew.”

It took Aramis an embarrassingly long moment to understand what Arielda meant, and even when he thought he got it, he had to be sure.

“You’re saying that d’Artagnan is a..fairy?”

Porthos swore around a mouthful of chewed fruit and began packing up their rations.

“Half-fae, yes.”

“Then…who’re the humans vying for his…”

“Crap!” Porthos, who had arrived at the same conclusion as Aramis and at the same time summed it up nicely for them both.

“So you see why we have to hurry?”

Nodding vigorously, they rose, shouldered their packs, and fell into a ground-eating jog behind Arielda, who was heading for what looked like a guard tower directly ahead of them and perhaps a quarter league away.

They arrived, barely winded, a few minutes later, and were challenged by two tall, well-armed guards in silver helms and leather vests.

Arielda said something low and in a different tongue and gestured to the mark on her neck. Without being asked, they gave the guards their backs and rucked up their hair to show their own marks of transit.

They were waved through with only a cursory inspection of their weapons and packs.

“How far to the palace?” Aramis asked as he jogged in her wake. She was keeping up a steady, though not punishing, pace.

“It’s a league and a half to the Mother Tree,” she answered, nodding in the direction of what he’d at first taken for some sort of bulwark or wall. Narrowing his eyes against the late afternoon glare, he realized it was the trunk of a titanic tree, larger than any he’d ever seen and stretching up into the heavens so far that it disappeared into the blue haze of the sky far above.

“Jesu Christi,” Aramis murmured. Beside him, Porthos grunted his agreement.

Arielda seemed to take a strange pride in their astonishment, favoring them with a rare smile.

“Wait,” Aramis said. “Before we go any further, shouldn’t we have a plan?”

Arielda shrugged. “We can’t make a plan without information,” she parried. “We’ll know more once we reach the Mother Tree.”

“Alright,” Porthos agreed. “Lead on.”

She broke into a fleet-footed run.

If that slip of a girl gave them a run for their lives, they had to hope there were no human witnesses to tell the tale.


	3. Fae, Hope, and Love

To Athos’ eternal surprise, they weren’t waylaid on their way to the Hall of the Ancestors, though even without delay, they were almost too late.

When they pushed through a set of enormous doors carved with the family trees of the great families of the Fair Folk, out of breath and sweating, a glowering crowd of alien faces turned as one to give them identical expressions of supreme disapproval.

All but Feverfew, who bustled forward with a smile on his face to usher them down a narrow aisle between rows of identical, light-wood benches and into the presence of the Queen, who was sitting on a magnificent throne to one side of a circular space perhaps twice the length of a man in circumference, at the center of which were Strix and Raven, the latter of whom greeted them with an impassive face and the barest nod of acknowledgement.

Unlike Strix, who groused in his own tongue to the queen and then said, “You’re late!” to them.

“Our apologies, Aunt,” d’Artagnan murmured, dropping into a courtly bow. “Your messenger was unavoidably delayed, and we did not receive word of the meeting place and time until less than an hour ago.”

Queen Serei turned a dark look on Raven, who dropped into his own bow and shook his head. “No, my Queen. I have not interfered with their invitations.”

“Such a thing is a violation of the rules of the Contest and can result in disqualification,” Strix blustered self-importantly.

Queen Serei gave him a dampening look, and he rushed on to say, “But all’s well that comes to naught, as they say. Shall we begin?”

As Strix read a seemingly interminable declaration of the purpose of the contest and the “prize” should he win, Athos found his eyes snared by the majesty of the room.

Far overhead, the ceiling arched to a dome supported by four carved columns of smooth, pale wood. In the dome were skylights that let a living green light filter into the space, painting the floor in a dim, dappled pattern, as of leaves on a forest floor. On the arched panels between skylights were painted scenes from the long history of the Fair Folk. Here, a fairy woman smote a dragon with a sword made of flame. There, a tall, stately man bestrode the peak of a storm-wracked mountain.

Beneath those lofty scenes, the children of the ancestors memorialized on the ceiling waited in a shifting, murmuring mass for the First Contest to begin.

Strix gestured to d’Artagnan, who moved out of the circle beneath the dome to a seat that had apparently been reserved for him at the queen’s side, and then Strix was unrolling a scroll and reading in an officious, carrying voice:

“The First Contest is a battle of wits. I, Strix, Recorder of Contests, do thus declare that each suitor must guess his opponent’s True Name. He has three questions by which to identify the True Name and may guess three times. Questions and guesses may come in any order. Questions must be answered truthfully. Only one suitor may guess at a time. Failure to posit the True Name of your opponent after three guesses is counted as a total loss for the contest. The human Jean-Marie, as the suitor who chose the nature of the first challenge, will be the first to ask his questions. You will guess Raven’s True Name. As soon as the third suitor is sequestered, we will begin.”

At this, the Recorder of Contests gestured to a guard, who stepped forward from behind the queen’s throne and gestured for Athos to follow him down an aisle situated opposite that throne. At the far end was a tall, narrow door, like what one might find on a monk’s cell. This the guard opened without a word, gesturing Athos inside and then closing the door soundlessly behind him.

Athos noted first that it was very quiet in the room, so quiet, in fact, that his own blood thundering in his ears seemed overloud. The room must be sound-proofed, somehow, to prevent cheating. It was a narrow, small space, absent of any decoration or furniture save a simple wooden chair. A single, slit window high in the wall overhead gave him enough light to see that there was no handle on his side of the door.

So, not a monk’s, then, but a prison cell.

Sighing, Athos resigned himself to a wait, eschewing the chair in favor of leaning against the wall opposite the door.

While he waited, Athos considered what he knew of fairy naming conventions. There was what d’Artagnan had already told him—that names were determined by profession. Thus, Feverfew, a physician, was named after a healing herb, and Pavo, a guard for all that he was also a strutting ass, was aptly named after the peacock. These were clearly not their “True Names,” or the contest would be over before it began.

So what constituted a True Name among the fairy folk? He had no idea.

For that matter, he wasn’t sure what his own True Name might be. Certainly it couldn’t be his name and full title, for that had been declaimed for all to hear when he’d declared his intention to be a Suitor.

By what other names had he been called? He discounted the kinds of crude names that children taunted one another with; surely it was nothing like that. His brother had sometimes called him “Wolf” for the way he’d liked to grow his hair long and wild, but he’d outgrown that in the vanity of his early teens.

Then a thought occurred to him that drove his cold heart up into his throat, making it hard for him to breathe around the shards of ice there. His wife had had a pet name for him, an intimacy she had shared with no one until the day he’d hanged her, when she had spat it at him as the noose tightened.

This, then, must be his True Name, he thought, for there can be no other appellation by which he had gone having more power to command him than this.

The thought of it being revealed before these gawping strangers or, worse, before d’Artagnan, who would surely know from whence it came…

Athos was not worried about his pride; suffering had taught him to be humble when the world poured its bitter rue over him. But to have such a thing betrayed to all? To have this name known, to be called by it in the presence of others?

He had almost killed Remi the blacksmith for having heard it on his wife’s twisted, bluing lips.

He told himself that there was no way for any other to guess it. He had spoken it to none, not even when deep in his anguished cups. And surely these fairy folk would have no way of finding it out, not in the time they’ve had since the contest was declared.

He turned his mind away from it, toward seeking Jean-Marie’s secret name.

All at once it became obvious to him what that name must be—something Beaumont used to humiliate the lad, to drive the boy to despair when he was on his knees before his molester.

Even as the horrific thought occurred to Athos, the door was opened, and he was ushered back out into the circle, where Jean-Marie was standing red-faced with humiliation, and the jeering crowd was pointing and commenting on his failure.

“The human suitor named Jean-Marie has failed to guess Raven’s True Name,” Strix declared, quieting the crowd with his official voice. “Raven will guess next. He may choose his opponent in this challenge.”

As much as Athos did not wish for the private torment of his True Name being made public, he was even less inclined to allow Jean-Marie’s own terrible secret to be revealed to the ravening mob of fae, whose expressions suggested that they would never tire of the entertainment human failings provided them.

Adopting a deliberately insouciant expression, therefore, and a slouching posture that suggested that he was bored beyond reckoning, Athos drew Raven’s attention long enough to give him an arched eyebrow. It implied that Athos had Raven out-matched, that this contest was nothing but a child’s game to him.

It had the intended effect.

“I choose Athos, Comte de la Fère.”

“Very well.” Strix made an impatient gesture of command, and the guard led Jean-Marie to the same cell where Athos had been kept.

When he was safely out of earshot, Raven asked, “What do your brother Musketeers call you over your cups and in jest?”

Athos relaxed; if this were the tenor of all of Raven’s questions, he would be revealing nothing.

“Captain,” he answered, “Or, on occasion, ‘Prince.’” (The former perhaps with more affection than teasing; the latter with gentle derision for the posh accent that emerged only when he was very drunk indeed.)

The second of the two names invited a storm of derisive chatter from the crowd, which Athos ignored easily. He’d been taunted worse by better and was impervious to their noise.

“And by what name were you called by your dead brother?”

This question, edging as it did nearer his dark past, made Athos uncomfortable, but he did not let it show.

“Wolf,” he answered, letting the buffeting sneers drift over him and away. His heart hammered faster against his ribs, however, and he feared the next question.

“And your wife, who was called Milady…what did she call you when you were entwined together in bed?”

Ice filled his chest, knifing through his lungs and robbing him of breath. As he struggled to breathe, he became aware of the silence of the crowd, of the way they waited, patient and predatory, for the delicious morsel of his most secret sorrow to feed their perverse appetite for pain.

He wished fervently that he could deny them their prize, but a look at the avid faces around him told him that he had no choice: He must answer or forfeit not only this contest but all of them. Refusing to play by the rules resulted in total disqualification from the contest.

Athos squared his shoulders and fixed his eyes on Raven’s, willing himself steady as a stone and calm as still water.

“Mon Coeur de feu,” he answered tonelessly, maintaining Raven’s gaze even as the crowd all around them erupted into paroxysms of mocking laughter. Someone called out filthy innuendo about other parts of him that were likewise prone to flame, and some wag offered an anatomically improbable suggestion about what he could do with his heart of fire.

He ignored their pleasure at his expense and studiously avoided looking at d’Artagnan for fear that he would see pity there, or worse, jealousy. He wanted nothing between them to be tainted with her touch.

Even as the bouts of ugly laughter rolled over them, a gong sounded, deep and loud and clear, and the roaring died down to titters and then a susurrus of speculation as Strix stepped forward and intoned, “Raven has correctly guessed Athos, Comte de la Fère’s true name.”

Pleased exclamations and clapping followed this pronouncement, and in the quiet that then ensued, Jean-Marie was returned to the circle.

“Athos, Comte de la Fère, it is now your turn to guess. Because there are still two names unspoken, you may choose your opponent for this contest.”

Athos swore vociferously to himself but kept his face a stoic mask as he considered. He had no doubt that he could get Jean-Marie to reveal his True Name with one pointed, awful question. But how could he do that to the young man? Hadn’t Jean-Marie suffered enough years of horrific humiliation? Should Athos add to that the public spectacle of revealing his abuse in front of these monstrous creatures?

Yet if Athos chose Raven as his opponent, he was far less likely to guess the right question. Surely, he should sacrifice Jean-Marie’s comfort for a chance to win the contest.

But if win he did—if he guessed Raven’s True Name correctly—then wouldn’t Jean-Marie’s name still be revealed as the tie-breaker?

Either way, then, the boy would be humiliated. Unless Athos chose Raven and guessed incorrectly.

Given the origin of his own True Name, Athos had a pretty good idea of what Raven’s must be. He need ask only the obvious question—what did Kayin call you when you shared your lover’s bed?

A glance at Jean-Marie and a second at d’Artagnan, however, decided it for him. The former was pale and wan, clearly terrified by the crowd. The latter was deeply anxious but straining to hide it. Only knowing him so well gave Athos the keys to unlocking d’Artagnan’s guarded expression.

He turned to Raven, who was wearing the challenging expression of a combatant already sure of his victory, and asked three irrelevant questions.

Later, when Jean-Marie had excused himself to lie down in the bedroom and Athos had sunk to a seat at the table to drown his loss in a deep cup of wine, d’Artagnan had come up behind him, wrapped him in a strong embrace from behind, and whispered, hot and shivery in his ear, “You are a true champion.”

The tone of the words and the way they loosed an arrow of desire straight to Athos’ core made up to a good degree for the humiliation of having lost the First Contest. And the way d’Artagnan trailed a hand down Athos’ chest, stopping at the flat of his belly and pressing there, a strangely intimate gesture, while saying, in a tight, low voice, “I know you threw the contest, and I know why,” erased for the most part the echoing memory of the raucous fairy crowd’s repulsive reveling when he’d lost.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he murmured, but when d’Artagnan leaned around his shoulder for an awkward but searing kiss, he didn’t demur. Nor did he put up any kind of protest, though he most certainly should have, when he was rewarded for his failure by a lapful of agile, lithe lover, who rocked against the evidence of his passion until the weight and heat of him, the searing kisses and secret words whispered against his sweat-damp neck, and the little noises d’Artagnan began to make as he neared his completion sent Athos over the edge, coming in his trousers like a much younger man and clenching d’Artagnan’s narrow waist as he, too, came undone in a glorious, shuddering wreck.

“You should have stopped me,” d’Artagnan murmured what seemed like hours later, his words ghosting cool air over Athos’ heated face, making him shiver.

He should have, but he hadn’t. He wanted to feel ashamed for their wantonness and apologize to Jean-Marie, who would have to have been dead not to have heard the bumping of the chair legs against the floor or the helpless noises Athos and d’Artagnan had made as they’d each come apart.

Distantly, Athos knew that he should be mortified. But actually, all he could feel was a warm lethargy and a sense of rightness that robbed him of volition. He thought it must be d’Artagnan’s magic, and he knew on some level that he should be afraid. But with d’Artagnan in his lap, the weight and heat of him and the sound of his breath as he calmed and it slowed, the taste of his mouth still in Athos’ mouth, he was overwhelmed with a peace that brought tears stinging to the corners of his eyes.

He would gladly die like this.

They rested a long while, forehead to forehead, d’Artagnan’s body bent like a bow in Athos’ arms, until at last d’Artagnan stirred and regained his feet. Still straddling Athos, though, he stopped and touched Athos’ chin, bringing his eyes up to search his own. “I love you,” d’Artagnan said clearly, no hesitation, no attempt to hide or be quiet, clearly claiming Athos regardless of their audience in the next room.

“For you, I would lose a thousand such contests,” Athos answered, smiling. He was rewarded with one of d’Artagnan’s wide, brilliant smiles that transformed his face into a study in satisfaction and joy. He had to breathe deeply and remember the discomfort of sticky smalls to stop from ravishing that mouth once more.

After all, Athos had been asked to choose the Second Contest, and tomorrow morning, he’d be fighting for d’Artagnan’s love with sword and dagger. For that, he needed his rest, and he would certainly get none if he stayed where he was, beneath d’Artagnan’s hot and loving look.

“Go to bed,” he said roughly, clearing his throat and continuing, “Alone.”

d’Artagnan’s grin turned lascivious and knowing, but he said only, “You first. You need the rest more. I’ll take both watches.”

He wanted to argue, but he was, indeed, tired, and he’d need all his strength if he was to best Raven in combat on the morrow.

He rose from his chair a little stiffly, grimacing at the uncomfortable sensation of his cooling spend, and kissed the smirk off of d’Artagnan’s lush mouth before retiring to his place on the floor before Jean-Marie’s door.

He was drifting off to visions of naked blades before d’Artagnan had finished smiling.

*****

“The First Contest has already ended,” Arielda reported, ducking into the silversmith’s workshop they were borrowing for cover. “Your friends did not acquit themselves well. The fairy guard, Raven, won the First Contest. Your friend, Athos, chose the nature of the Second: Swords and daggers. The match is set for dawn tomorrow.”

“Then we have to get them out tonight,” Aramis said at once, Porthos nodding vigorously beside him.

“We can’t.”

“I think you underestimate our resolve.”

“Or overestimate your intelligence,” she snapped. “They’re staying with Cainson—the one you call d’Artagnan—in his royal chambers, which are in the most heavily guarded part of the Mother Tree, with additional guards outside the door. There is no way for us to make it to them, secure their freedom, and escape Ebenhome before someone notices what’s going on. Besides, there is the fate of the Three Realms to consider.”

Aramis narrowed his eyes, but before he could pursue his thought, Porthos said, “Yeah, what is your interest in that, exactly? Are you bucking for queen or something?”

Because he had never bought into Porthos’ big, stoic, and stupid routine, he wasn’t at all surprised by his observation, but Arielda seemed to be reassessing both of them.

“I’m trying to prevent an all-out war between the Three Realms.”

“Why?” Aramis asked the question quietly and seriously. He knew there was something here he hadn’t understood, and he was equally well aware that it was information vital to the success of their mission.

She looked at them both a good, long while before resolve hardened her features and she nodded sharply to herself. “The Fair Folk are failing. They’re so bound up in their stupid rules about not mixing the blood of the races that they can’t see that their population is dwindling. My father, brother of the Fairy Queen, for all his many faults, believed that the only way to survive as a race was to interbreed, as he called it. My mother saw my birth as an opportunity to seed influence in two courts, as it were.”

Aramis nodded, familiar as he was with the tortuous paths that royal politics could take, in any world, it seemed.

“My mother’s people, on the contrary, have the opposite problem: They’re suffering overpopulation.”

“So, you seek to expand the Goblins’ territory?” Aramis thought he knew where this was going.

“My mother does.”

Maybe he was wrong.

“But you don’t?”

Arielda shook her head and paced once, twice, a third time the length of the long, narrow workroom with its cold forge in the center and the high worktables along the walls.

“I want peace and compromise. The Goblins need more room. The Fairy need more people. I see in that an opportunity for progress.”

Aramis smiled, but beside him, Porthos made a doubting sound and said, “Your mother’s people don’t recognize you as a princess and Ananias and his lot don’t much care for mixed blood either. What makes you think you can make it work?”

Arielda considered Porthos for a long moment. “You’re like me, aren’t you?” she said, after a time.

Porthos nodded.

“Then you know that where there’s a disadvantage to being what we are, there are also advantages. People overlook us, discount us.”

“Think we’re weak and stupid,” Porthos added in agreement.

“Whereas we’re actually smart and strong and capable.”

“And,” Aramis interjected, “in your case, potential heir to the throne of two realms.”

Arielda smiled slyly and dipped her chin in acknowledgement of his point.

“So what are we doing here, exactly? I thought we were in a hurry.” Porthos’ words broke the momentary spell of camaraderie and warm fellow-feeling and brought cold reality crashing back over their heads.

“We’re going to the Second Contest first thing in the morning, and we’re going to see what happens.”

“That’s…not much of a plan,” Aramis noted, deflating somewhat from his earlier hope that Arielda might be leading a secret army or something of that nature.

“It’s what we’ve got,” she answered. “And in the meantime, I know a place where we can stay.”

It became clear to Aramis that Arielda was not sharing the entirety of her plan with them as they were ushered through a narrow postern gate, led through a low door, and then guided through the maze-like corridors of the area of the royal palace reserved for the serving class, who were, to a man, woman, and child, Goblins.

Hundreds if not thousands of them, if every room they passed was occupied.

“We can wait here,” Arielda said, ushering them into a small, spotlessly clean room, plainly but solidly furnished with a table and chairs, washstand, sideboard, and cold cupboard. A narrow, rectangular window near the ceiling let in a diffuse green light, and he realized that the majority of the room was just below ground level, somewhere in the very base of the great tree.

A slight, pretty Goblin girl gave a deferential curtsey at the door and then proceeded to lay out a simple but ample meal for them. The wine was light and sweet, soothing to the palate and to the nerves, Aramis thought, as a certain ease washed over him. He wondered for a moment if he’d been drugged, but no. He thought he was just tired.

The bread was soft and warm, the cheese soft and tart, the fruit delightfully juicy and sweet. Porthos ate with a grin on his face, and Aramis couldn’t help but smile to see it. Arielda, in contrast, took little refreshment and did not even join them at the table, instead pacing the room in a manner that seemed to betray her nervousness.

“What do you expect is going to happen in the morning?” Aramis asked.

Arielda shrugged, but it was a studied movement, and he saw in her posture and in her face something of her age—she was still young and to a degree untried. She herself was unsure of what might happen on the morrow.

Aramis supposed he would have to wait and see. There was little chance that he and Porthos would blend in, even with hoods to hide their lack of pointed ears. Besides, he was fairly certain they’d get lost.

“So what’ll we do in the meantime?” Porthos asked.

Aramis had a few ideas, but none of them were appropriate for mixed company. Still, by his grin, he relayed his thoughts, and Porthos returned a gaze hot with answering desire.

Arielda stopped pacing and cast around as though looking for diversion. Her gaze alighted on their belts, and Aramis assumed she was considering their actual weapons, a thought that was confirmed by her next words:

“I’ll have whetstones delivered,” she said, “and a map of the palace and its environs.”

Aramis approved. “Excellent. We’ll be as ready as we can be.”

The light from the room’s only window faded, dim shadows growing longer on the floor as they pored over the maps, memorizing the entrances and exits to the field where tomorrow’s contest would be held and arguing the pros and cons of various escape routes from the hall to the streets of Ebenhome.

They had a late meal of stew, fresh bread, dried fruits and nuts, and spent some time seeing that their weapons were in optimum condition for the uses to which they might soon be put.

A servant girl had lit fragrant lamps, casting the space in a golden glow, and Aramis was nursing a cup of wine when Arielda said, “I can have someone take you to a bedchamber.”

They didn’t need to exchange glances but said, “Yes,” and then, “Please,” in unison, and that got another sly smile out of her, but she said nothing further.

The same girl who’d been serving them came to the door and gestured, and they followed her a few dozen feet down the corridor to a door through which she gestured. Inside, a single lamp lit a small, plain room with a double pallet bed set in one corner, a washstand and basin, already full of steaming water, and a screen and chamber pot.

“Someone will knock like this,” the girl said shyly, demonstrating three long, two short, two long knocks on the doorframe, “when it’s time for you to go. Don’t answer it else.”

“We understand,” Aramis answered, bowing a little and saying, “We are in your debt, Miss.”

The Goblin girl blushed, ducked her head, and disappeared, pulling the door closed firmly behind her.

Porthos slid the bolt home, and they were alone with a bed and time to spend for the first time in what felt like forever.

They wasted no time doffing their clothes, though they took care to keep their weapons to hand, and were soon stretched out on the bed, side by side and facing one another. Porthos was propped up on one elbow and tracing the line of Aramis’ cheek with his hand. It was ever a source of wonder that such huge, strong hands, hands that were scarred from combat and bare-knuckle brawls and the long labor of a hard-lived life could be so gentle and arouse such delicious shivers of anticipated pleasure, even after all of the time they’d been together.

Aramis gave in to his selfish need to be touched and lay back on the bed to open all of himself to those hands.

Porthos offered his pirate’s smile, lowering his mouth to suck a tight brown nipple into his mouth, and Aramis arched his back, closed his eyes, and let go of the last of his tension.

Later, breathless and sweaty and sticky with their mutual spend, Aramis traced his own callused sword hand down Porthos’ chest, through the damp arrow of hair on his belly, and across the ticklish crease of his pelvis. Porthos grunted and squirmed but did not object as Aramis continued the exploration of the beloved, familiar shaft, now quiescent and damp.

Like Porthos’ hands, his cock was powerful, long and hard and punishing when Aramis desired it but also soft and vulnerable, as now, the flesh of its head wrinkled and, Aramis noted, salty, as he bent to lick his lover clean. Porthos’ deft fingers laced through his hair, the rumble of his pleasure shaking both of them as Aramis finished his worship, sucked in a gusting breath of the scent of their loving, and then stretched out beside Porthos once more, their fingers entwined, his leg tucked snug between Porthos’ two, his head resting on the pillow of his shoulder, and the world receding for a precious while as they slept the sleep of the sated and blessed.

*****

The morning messenger led them out of one of the Mother Tree’s myriad gates to the site chosen for the Second Contest, which was, as far as Athos could tell, situated on the western side of a sprawling village that spread out from the enormous roots of the great tree.

Suitors’ Field was a vast, flat green stretching to a seemingly limitless distance. Only by narrowing his eyes could Athos make out the trees that marked the farthest boundary of the space. It reminded him of certain battlefields he’d been on, an association both inspiring for its familiarity and unsettling for its implications.

Finely wrought viewing stands had been erected to either side of a smaller field, demarcated by flagged poles, situated at the near end of the enormous green. A crowd of fairies, their Goblin servants scurrying to and fro to fetch cushions and refreshments, was gossiping and pointing as Athos, d’Artagnan, and Jean-Marie strode onto the field, stopping a few paces from Strix, who was waiting there, back ramrod straight and hand clutching a ubiquitous vellum scroll. Feverfew was there also, and he gave the three of them a wink and a smile as they approached.

Athos noted a clear space in the center of the largest and most elaborate of the stands, where an imposing throne awaited the arrival of Queen Serei. He wondered what her delay might mean but dismissed the thought as Raven approached, flanked by two equally fit fairy guards, one male, one female.

He did not bother to introduce them.

There was a breathing silence between the two groups while the noise of the gathering crowd washed over them, a silence only broken when that noise peaked and then abruptly died.

The Queen had arrived, with all of her attendant train. A Goblin man, grey-haired and slightly stooped, hastened forward, staggering under the burden of a second chair, this one plainer than the throne but no less obviously a seat of honor.

He placed it on the step below and to the left of the throne and bowed himself backward off of the royal viewing stand.

“What’s this?” Athos murmured, and to his surprise, Feverfew answered, sidling closer to say, in a low voice, “That is Ananias, natural half-brother of the Queen. They have the same father, but Ananias’ mother was, alas, not of the nobility. He has never been recognized as a successor, but he is still entitled to some privileges of royalty.”

A female fairy in the livery of the Queen’s court stepped forward to blow a clear, high note on a herald trumpet. A second fairy, male and similarly attired, joined her to announce:

“Queen Serei, ruler of the Fairy Realm and high monarch of the Three Realms, attends the Second Contest as kin to the Beloved sought, the Prince Cainson.”

The herald hesitated for a fraction of a second, clearly unsure of what to say next, when one of Ananias’ own attendants stepped forward.

“Lord Ananias, beloved kin of Queen Serei, attends the Second Contest as Arbiter of Tradition.”

Athos had only a vague idea of what the title suggested, but judging by the way Strix betrayed his characteristic composure with a surprised sound, it didn’t bode well for them.

He searched Raven’s face for some sign and found there a smugness that increased his uneasiness tenfold.

At a nod from the queen, Strix cleared his throat, unrolled the scroll, and began to intone in a carrying voice: “The Second Contest, having been chosen by Athos, Comte de la Fère, will be swords and daggers, the winner to be determined by the combatant who first draws blood three times from his opponent.”

In a quieter voice, Strix said, “Athos, Comte de la Fère, your sword.” At his words, a guard broke rank to stride to Athos and thrust a sheathed sword into his hands. Athos was immensely gratified to find that it was his own, much-loved weapon, which had stood him in good stead in many a contest.

As he pulled his sword from its sheath to examine it for tampering—one could never be too careful—a voice from the viewing stands said, “I object to the terms of combat.” Every man at the center of the field turned to see that Ananias had risen from his chair and stepped forward to the railing.

He was declaiming to the crowd, not addressing the suitors personally.

“Too long have we allowed ourselves to be weakened by the infiltration of lesser elements.” His eyes deliberately caught and held d’Artagnan’s, and the sheer frozen malice there made Athos want to interpose himself between them.

Beside him, d’Artagnan had tensed, but he was matching the fairy’s icy gaze with a fiery one of his own. Athos reminded himself that d’Artagnan did not need, and perhaps more importantly would not want, his protection. Some things, one had to do for himself.

“Over time, we have lost our strength as a race. We cannot match the numbers or power of our ancestors because we have grown soft, substituting what is easy for what is right. That ends today, my noble friends.”

The fairy paused and was rewarded by a murmur of support that swept through the stands like an ill wind.

Still, Athos noted that it was hardly an unqualified show of unified support, and judging by the sidelong glances and thinning mouths he saw among many of the assembled fairy folk, Ananias was not universally beloved.

“Today, I exercise my right as Arbiter of Tradition to name the Second Contest a contest to the death.”

The murmur this time was louder—some approving cheers but also vocal protests.

“Brother,” Queen Serei said then, not deigning to rise from her throne but exercising her royal influence with deceptive ease—the simple syllables made Athos’ insides squirm, and even Raven looked nonplussed at the creeping unease she sowed with so little apparent effort.

“There has been good reason, which you well know, for us to prevent these trials of honor from becoming deadly. We have too many enemies and too few warriors to waste our lives in fighting amongst ourselves.”

“Sister,” Ananias answered, obviously mocking the way she had invoked a familial tie that neither of them especially cared to recognize, “there is only one of _us_ fighting today, and I hardly think the contest will be fatal to him.” His emphasis made his meaning obvious.

The crowd’s response was subdued—the Queen’s display of power had cowed them, enemies and allies alike—but the general tenor of the noise was affirmative: The gathered fairies would be happy to watch Raven shed the blood of two inconsequential and impertinent humans.

Though it was clear from her body language that Queen Serei was displeased with Ananias’ maneuvering, she seemed unable or unwilling to continue the debate with her brother, at least not in a public venue. Perhaps she sensed that internecine tensions might come to a crisis if she resisted her half-brother’s demands. Whatever her motive, she waved almost dismissively at Strix, clearly intending that he should continue the contest under the new, fatal terms.

“Let it be noted that the Arbiter of Tradition has declared this Second Contest a contest to the death. The losers of yesterday’s First Contest will combat together. The winner of that combat will face Raven for the final prize. Athos, Comte de la Fère, and Jean-Marie, Comte de Castelmore, prepare for battle.”

Raven and his fellows walked off the field towards the Queen’s viewing stand, where Athos noticed absently that there was a bench, a pitcher of water, cups, and the like, apparently put there for the contestants. His attention was drawn immediately back to his companions, however, when d’Artagnan gripped his arm and said, “You can’t kill him,” his voice so thick with unspoken things that he sounded like a stranger.

Jean-Marie made an angry sound and gripped the hilt of his sword. “Thank you for your vote of confidence in my abilities, d’Artagnan. As it happens, I’m an excellent swordsman. I haven’t spent all of my days on my knees, you know.”

d’Artagnan jerked around, and even Athos had to admit to shock at the younger man’s crude—and public—exclamation. If Strix or Feverfew had heard and understood, they gave no sign, but even so…

“Jean-Marie, it’s not that I don’t think you’re incapable, but Athos is—.”

The young man cut him off with a short, sharp bark, an ugly laugh spewing out of him. “Were you going to say ‘Musketeer,’ I wonder? Do I get a prize for guessing?” The rictus grin was unsettling, and Athos was glad when Jean-Marie went on:

“Can we just get on with it?”

He sounded cocksure, but Athos detected the signs of real fear—a certain whiteness about the mouth, a nervous tic at the corner of his eye; the boy was putting on bravado for the sake of their audience, and, too, for d’Artagnan’s sake. It was a motivation he understood, having indulged in a similar deflection at yesterday’s contest, feigning ignorance when he could have had victory.

It made him admire Jean-Marie. When he drew his sword and executed a series of swift practice swings accompanied by impressively deft footwork, Athos’ admiration grew—as did his relief. He hadn’t relished the thought of attacking a significantly weaker opponent; it was better if they were more equally matched.

Still, there was the matter of the outcome.

“You can’t kill him,” d’Artagnan repeated, though now it wasn’t entirely clear to whom he was speaking. It seemed to have just occurred to him that the outcome in either case would be devastating.

“Failure to execute your opponent with swiftness and mercy will result in your total disqualification from the suit.” This from Strix, naturally.

From Jean-Marie’s fierce expression, it didn’t seem like mercy would be an issue for him; he appeared quite eager to shed Athos’ blood.

Athos, on the other hand, had serious reservations about delivering the killing blow. If he killed Jean-Marie, would d’Artagnan ever again see him as Athos, his brother and lover, and not the man who’d killed his first love?

“What if we both refuse to fight to the death?” Athos directed the question to Strix, but he kept an eye on Jean-Marie to gauge his reaction. It was clear from the surprise on the latter’s face that such mutual magnanimity had not occurred to him.

“You would each forfeit your right to continue your respective suits,” Strix said. His voice was stilted, and his expression suggested he’d just smelled something foul.

There seemed to be no help for it, then. Taking a deep breath and turning apologetic eyes on d’Artagnan, he drew his sword and turned to face Jean-Marie.

Strix intoned the rules of the fight, none of which differed significantly from the human version of same, and then instructed them to separate by three sword lengths, offer their courtesy to the queen, and await his order to begin.

For Athos, experienced in both tournament and battlefield combat, this match was not, in itself, a source of anxiety. But the presence of a largely hostile crowd and an awareness of the stakes of this particular contest made his throat dry and his heart kick wildly in his chest. His breath came short, and he closed his eyes briefly against the noise of the blood pounding in his ears, taking in a long breath before raising his sword, pommel up so that it made a cross, in a private salute to a God with whom he often differed. Offering a prayer—not that he might kill another man, never that, but that d’Artagnan remain safe and the outcome of the day be in their favor, whatever that might be—he moved fluidly into the en garde position and waited.

Five yards away, Jean-Marie mirrored him, minus the private devotion.

There was a light breeze, which wafted the scent of newly mown sweetgrass and the delicate herbs of the field that were crushed beneath his boot soles. Somewhere, horses were calling to one another, the pure bruits carrying like wild song to them. In the stands, the fairy folk shifted and whispered, a lilting susurrus in counterpoint to the sharp clang of a smith’s hammer from the crafters’ quarter off to the east, by Athos’ estimate.

All of these sensations came in the span of a few breaths as he watched Jean-Marie and waited, hand holding his sword in a familiar, comfortable grip, shoulders relaxed, feet apart, all the tension and worry held in abeyance now against the moment of joining.

Combat was much like lovemaking in this way: When it came to the deed itself, there was no longer time to consider the consequences, only the space between being and doing. He was a warrior, and he would fight.

Before the word “Begin” had finished echoing across the field, Jean-Marie advanced on him with a series of thrusts, lightning-fast and accurate, which Athos was hard-pressed to parry. He leapt to one side and turned, putting some space between them, trying to evaluate the boy’s strengths and ferret out his weaknesses.

Twice more he allowed Jean-Marie to attack, seeking only to parry his moves, noting that he tended to a clockwise flick of the sword and that he was weaker on his left side. Once, the tip of Jean-Marie’s sword scathed Athos’ arm above his leather gauntlet, but it was a mere bee-sting to the wounds he’d suffered before, and he let it go.

A second flick peeled the skin off his neck below his left ear, and Athos had to admit that the boy was fast—faster than Athos himself. Had Athos not deflected the cut with the foible of his sword at the last moment, he’d have lost the ear—or possibly his life.

At last, on his fourth attack, as Jean-Marie’s blade swept down and across, as though to bisect Athos’ chest on a diagonal, Athos caught the blow, his own blade gliding down Jean-Marie’s in a whining scream, fouling his guard and distracting him, so that when Athos brought his free hand up to grip Jean-Marie’s wrist and drag him forward, the other man lost his balance.

Pressing his advantage, Athos used their joined guards as a fulcrum to pivot and drop his knee behind Jean-Marie’s forward leg, shoving with his shoulder and toppling Jean-Marie to the ground.

With the instinct of someone who had trained in swordplay but never fought in earnest, Jean-Marie loosened his grip as he tried to catch his fall, and Athos wrenched Jean-Marie’s sword back with his own and then leapt free of his kick as Jean-Marie tried to bring Athos down with him.

Athos stood looking down at him, both swords held aloft, and for a moment saw only a desperate boy scrabbling in the dirt, heard only his own hard breathing and Jean-Marie’s fluent curses.

Then the crowd noise pressed in, words foreign but meaning clear: _Kill! Kill! Kill!_

Raking the stands with a look of supreme disdain, Athos tossed both swords to the ground at Strix’s feet, pulled his dagger, and assumed a fighting stance once more.

Jean-Marie regained his feet gracefully enough and unsheathed his own dagger.

Knife-fighting wasn’t a gentleman’s sport, precisely, though all good soldiers knew how to use their dagger in close combat, how useful it was to come in low, up under a shield, when you were unhorsed and fighting man to man. Porthos had taught Athos things he’d never have learned from a fencing master—and a few things it was illegal to use on the tournament field, as well.

The thought of Porthos at that moment sent a shaft of longing lancing through him, and he had to cut the thoughts off and wall them away so that he could concentrate on staying alive.

Athos was relieved to see that Jean-Marie seemed to know how to grip the knife to do the greatest amount of damage without risking his own fingers. It was a testament to the perversity of their contest that Athos persisted in being worried for a young man whom he was expected to kill.

Jean-Marie seemed content to let Athos take the lead this time, watching cautiously as Athos feinted, gauging Jean-Marie’s reach. He was taller than Athos, his arms longer, and with the sword he’d been a shade faster, too, so Athos took his time in the assessment.

Jean-Marie, for his part, stood his ground, turning warily on the pivot and keeping his weight centered. There was tension in his shoulders and a certain stiffness to his posture that belied his outward calm. In another case, Athos may have reveled in his opponent’s unease; in this, he was only saddened.

At last, he took to the attack, shifting his grip on the knife so that he could use his gauntleted forearm as a shield against parries and coming in close to try to get inside Jean-Marie’s answering thrust.

The first round went to Jean-Marie, who parried Athos’ thrust and used his passing momentum to rake open Athos’ left cheek at the jaw. The cut stung as it opened and bled, but Athos rubbed his face against his shirt and otherwise ignored it, turning his body in profile, wielding the dagger like an epee, making himself appear vulnerable and shaken by the cut.

The stands around him had erupted at the sight of blood, but he shut that distraction out, too, watching instead Jean-Marie’s face. His eyes were a little manic, lit with self-satisfaction, but he was concentrating, still cautious, not counting his cuts before they were made, and again Athos was impressed.

Athos made circles in the air with his blade and took two steps forward on his leading foot, the weight on his rear poised for a serious thrust.

Jean-Marie dodged into range, feinted left, and then spun away from a shallow cut Athos left on his leading arm.

Athos didn’t let him return to rest position, instead pressing him with a series of quick slashes that missed his guarding gauntlet by inches. Athos feinted a downward slash, reversed the blade in his hand, and came up under Jean-Marie’s guard arm.

Jean-Marie deflected Athos’ thrust at the last moment, the tip of Athos’ dagger slicing a bloody runnel in the boy’s throat, but before he could bring his own dagger into play, Athos gripped him about the torso in a wrestling tackle and dropped him to the ground, letting his full weight land hard across Jean-Marie’s stomach, driving the wind out of him. He got a knee on Jean-Marie’s knife-arm, pinning it, but Jean-Marie wasn’t giving anything up.

Jean-Marie made a fist with his off hand and began to pummel Athos, aiming for the tender flesh of his ear and the vulnerable Adam’s apple, while with his heels dug into the earth and thrust his hips upward, trying to knock Athos from his unsteady perch.

Athos struggled to pin Jean-Marie’s free hand, but the young man was strong and rangy, and he landed a blow that opened the thin skin of Athos’ brow over his left eye. Blood began at once to drip into his eye and down his face, catching on his lips before painting Jean-Marie’s doublet with spatter.

Athos shook his head and blinked to clear his vision of the stinging veil and at last got a grip on Jean-Marie’s wrist, forcing it by main strength to the ground and holding him there, letting him kick and thrust upward in an awful parody of the act of love, until he began to tire.

Only then did Athos bring his dagger point against Jean-Marie’s throat, close enough that if Jean-Marie swallowed hard, he’d open the flesh there.

Athos could see the big blue vessel leaping in his throat; he knew intimately the manner in which the fountain of his blood would geyser from that spot, coating them both, the living and the dead, in sticky red ichor. It was a mercy kill, quick and relatively painless, only the dimming eyes and the slow drumming of the fading heart to give away the agony of the letting go.

He did not want to kill this man.

Athos looked up from where Jean-Marie lay beneath him, having stilled at last and held his breath, waiting, waiting. He searched out the eyes not of Strix or the one called Ananias or the queen herself. He sought only d’Artagnan’s gaze, which fell upon him like a physical blow.

d’Artagnan knew the match was his, Athos’, knew the cost of winning—and knew that Athos would not pay it if it meant losing d’Artagnan’s love.

Rather Athos should die here than sacrifice that.

But it wasn’t Athos’ sacrifice the crowd wanted. The shrieking choirs of hateful strangers demanded death. If Athos refused to deliver it, he’d be disqualified, and Raven would be more than happy to re-enact the death scene, with a different outcome for the bloodthirsty crowd.

Even so, Athos hesitated.

Waited.

It was Jean-Marie that broke the stalemate, whispering, “Please.”

Athos thought the boy was begging for his life and had to stifle his distaste. He turned his eyes to Jean-Marie, only to find that he was not addressing Athos at all but d’Artagnan.

And, from d’Artagnan’s answering expression, it was not life the boy begged for but death.

That was, somehow, both better and worse at once.

d’Artagnan held Jean-Marie’s look for the span of several breaths. The background noise of the vicious crowd faded away, until it was just the three of them in a tragic tableau:

d’Artagnan, tears on his face, resigned and anguished, nodding to Athos.

Athos, turning back to face Jean-Marie, the dagger steady in his grip but his eyes blurring with sweat, blood, and his own tears.

And Jean-Marie, a brave smile turning up the corners of his mouth, in his eyes not fear or anger or sorrow but only relief, relief like a second blow that squeezed a fist of regret around Athos’ heart even as he brought the razor-sharp blade across the boy’s throat and painted there a mockery of his dying smile.

He should have been able to hear nothing over the revulsive roar of the crowd, but Athos heard d’Artagnan’s words even though he stood yards away, even though Strix was, rather redundantly, declaring the outcome of the contest, even though his ears felt stoppered with cotton from the thrash of his blood pounding there.

d’Artagnan said, “I love you, Athos.”

And then there was a gentle hand on his shoulder, and another on his arm, helping him up and leading him away from Jean-Marie’s cooling body.

“You had no choice,” d’Artagnan said, when he’d led Athos off the field and into a tent erected for the care of wounds.

Feverfew was there, already armed with a cool compress infused with a light-scented herb that soothed the sting of the cut above his eye and the one on his jaw, all but forgotten in his numbness at what he’d been forced to do.

That numbness served him well on the one hand, as Feverfew took a fine needle and silken thread to close the cut on his brow.

“The other is fine. It should heal cleanly,” he assured Athos, who didn’t care but mustered up enough energy for thanks.

Feverfew waved his gratitude away and hastened away, calling over his retreating back, “You have a few minutes only before you’re called for the second combat.”

“Athos?”

d’Artagnan sounded young and lost, but when Athos finally worked up the courage to meet his eyes, he saw there a man older than he remembered, more somber. The weight of his grief pinched his eyes and dragged at the corners of his mouth.

But he managed a smile, a weak, abortive thing barely strong enough to be called a smile.

Still, it sparked a feeble answer in Athos, who accepted a cup of wine from d’Artagnan and drank it down in a single, long draught before putting the cup away from himself, decisively, and rising from the cot where he’d been tended.

“I’m alright,” he said, though he felt unmoored, unsure what to do with his hands or where to look.

d’Artagnan solved that problem by stepping into his space and wrapping him tightly in a crushing embrace.

The strength of d’Artagnan’s arms and heat of his body penetrated the disengagement of shock, and Athos was horrified to hear a broken, choked sob escape him before he gave in to d’Artagnan’s touch, burying his face against d’Artagnan’s shoulder and trying to marshal his anguish, which seem to have redoubled in strength thanks to having been suppressed.

They might have stayed that way forever, ignoring Strix’s increasingly impatient calls for all combatants to return to the field, but for the throat-clearing shuffle at the door of the tent and a familiar voice saying, “I told you this would happen. You owe me a bottle of that Bordeaux I like so much.”

*****

As gratifying as it was to be right—Aramis had bet Porthos a bottle of good wine that Athos and d’Artagnan would at some point soon give in to their obvious mutual attraction—Aramis didn’t have time to enjoy his “I told you so.”

Their arrival at the contest field had been unavoidably delayed by their need for stealth, and though there were willing Goblin accomplices to abet their secret mission, the last quarter league had been fraught with hazards. They’d narrowly missed capture and/or death on at least three separate occasions.

They had witnessed only the final moments of the first battle and had been prevented from charging onto the field by Arielda, who rightly noted that they would throw away all of their efforts to this point if they revealed themselves now. Arielda urged them instead to sneak to the medical tent and warn them of Ananias’ treachery. Now, with the impatient braying of that officious court herald, or whatever he was, their reunion was further curtailed.

d’Artagnan and Athos had separated and were staring at them with a mixture of disbelief and joy.

“What are you doing here?” the pair asked in unison, and Aramis chuckled at their momentary embarrassment at the faux pas. It was clear that they were helplessly smitten.

“Saving you from certain death, of course,” Aramis answered. Porthos, who was peering out the tent flap at the field and crowd, turned back to them to say, “We have a lot to catch up on, but what you need to know right now is that Ananias is plotting against the queen.”

“We suspected as much,” Athos answered, remembering the Arbiter of Tradition’s attitude toward them and his half sister.

“He’s got a rebel army camped in the forest to the east, and he intends to see that the Treaty of the Three Realms is voided at all costs, starting with preventing you,” Aramis indicated d’Artagnan with a point of his chin, “from marrying anyone.”

“Yeah,” Porthos continued, sparing a glance for the increasingly fractious voice of the herald and the crowd. “He let us go because he thought we’d burst in and disrupt things.”

“But we have a different plan,” Aramis assured them, offering a piratical smile that had proven irresistible by everyone on which he’d used it.

Until he met Athos, apparently.

“I have a plan, as well.”

His brothers in arms waited with barely leashed impatience.

“I’m going to win d’Artagnan’s hand in marriage.”

They offered twin smiles that married lascivious good will with excitement at the potential violence Athos was promising, and then they were embracing one another with much back-clapping and loud congratulating and not a few anatomically improbable suggestions for the honeymoon.

Then the tent flap was wrenched back and a worried Feverfew said to Athos, “If you do not get yourself to the contest field this instant, you will be disqualified.”

If he was surprised to see that the number of humans in the tent had doubled, he did not betray himself. Instead, he simply stood, holding the tent flap open like a porter, and waited for them to file out, Athos striding back out onto the field of battle while d’Artagnan made his way to the sidelines.

While they both had excellent vision, the location of the medical tent made it difficult for them to clearly see the contest, so they raised the hoods on their borrowed cloaks and snuck out the back of the tent, Porthos making an egress for them with his dagger.

Working their way to the rear of the viewing stands wasn’t difficult for them, and soon they were peering from between the legs of the fairies seated in those stands.

The combat had already started. Aramis noted that Athos’ opponent was a tall, broad-shouldered, black-haired fairy who, by his dress, seemed to be one of the warrior caste he’d observed in significant numbers on their relatively short visit to this inhospitable place.

By the manner in which the fairy held his sword and the breathtaking grace of his movements, he was experienced in the fighting arts. By the way Athos was already on the defensive, he was probably better than their friend.

Porthos muttered, “Watch your right flank!” even as the fairy feinted, switched hands, and lunged at Athos, who threw himself to one side, fell, rolled, and came up again, sword held in two hands to stop a downward chop that would have cleaved him from top to torso.

As it was, Athos barely deflected the blow, and the fairy’s sword glanced off his left shoulder. Aramis winced, and Porthos hissed between his teeth.

By the way Athos was clenching and unclenching his left hand, the blow had left his arm numb, a sensation with which Aramis was painfully familiar.

Another attack, this one making a blur of the fairy’s slashing blade. The irregular rhythm of the blows made a kind of martial music as Athos was driven steadily back. At last, their friend caught a downward slash, flicked his blade in a circle, and cast the blow off wide, leaving his opponent’s left side exposed.

With the speed and skill for which he was famous in their world, Athos pressed his advantage, but the fairy was fast—faster than any swordsman Aramis had ever seen—and Athos’ blade met only air.

With the flat of his blade, as if taunting Athos, the fairy slapped him on his sword arm as momentum carried Athos by, and Aramis sucked in a breath at both the insult and the injury. If Athos’ sword arm was impaired, he’d be dead for sure.

He exchanged worried looks with Porthos and then gritted his teeth and gave him a resolved nod. It would likely mean their own deaths, but if it seemed that Athos was going to be killed, they would intercede on behalf of their friend, no matter the cost. That’s what it meant to be Musketeers and brothers in every way that mattered.

Over their heads, the crowd was boisterous in support of their man. Every blow he landed against Athos raised a blood-curdling shout; they wanted blood and would have Athos’.

On the field, Athos circled, wary, eyes fixed on the fairy, who seemed to be speaking to him, though Aramis couldn’t hear what he was saying over the crowd noise and at that distance.

Then another exchange of blows, rapid and keen, and Athos’ sword-arm was suffering, as was clear from the cant of his shoulder and the way he was more protective of his right side.

He parried a thrust clumsily, fell to one knee—the crowd was wild with glee—and then came up under the fairy’s sword arm to jog his grip on his hilt.

It was a good trick, and with a human opponent, it would have worked. Indeed, Aramis had watched Athos disarm countless opponents with the same maneuver. But the fairy seemed proof against even Athos’ battle-tested tactics, and he merely took a quick, surprised step backwards and spun away.

Athos followed him and managed to rake his back with the tip of his sword, but there was no blood to show for it, and if the fairy felt it, his movements didn’t falter or slow.

Again, they faced one another, and it was even more obvious that Athos was struggling. Sweat had turned his hair into a tangled nest; his doublet was soaked through in the front and back. One gauntlet had been slashed open, and he was bleeding freely from the cut that Jean-Marie had delivered to his jaw. The flesh around the stiches over his left eye was red and swollen, and he seemed to be having trouble keeping that eye open.

The fairy, on the other hand, appeared completely unwinded, as fresh as when he’d stepped onto the field.

Aramis exchanged a nod with Porthos; they were going to stop this before their friend was injured beyond repair. They were about to step out into the narrow alley between two viewing stands when a clear voice rang out, commanding silence, which fell like a stifling blanket over the crowd and the competitors.

A cold, imperious male voice—it could only belong to Ananias—said, “We shall have a brief respite.”

Aramis wondered at his decision: A rest break would favor Athos, who was suffering from Raven’s superior strength and speed. Why give their friend a chance to recover? It had to be a trap of some kind, and he pondered their chances of returning unseen to the medical tent to warn Athos.

Even as he watched, however, Athos’ fairy opponent followed their friend into the tent, and he knew that their intentions were thwarted.

“D’you think he’s hurt?” Porthos asked, and Aramis knew he didn’t mean Athos—it was clear to them both the state their brother was in.

Aramis shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s certainly possible. That raking Athos gave him across his back must have stung, even if it didn’t break skin.”

Despite knowing there was nothing they could do from this distance, they stood side by side under the viewing stands, as close to the medical tent as they could without being seen, and fixed their eyes on the tent flaps.

The fairy who’d come to fetch Athos from the tent earlier had followed the two combatants in, but a few minutes later, a thin, lanky fairy of middle size, with clubbed brown hair and in the plainest clothes they’d yet seen on the fairy folk, ducked into the tent too.

“That can’t be good,” Porthos said.

“No,” Aramis agreed.

d’Artagnan was nowhere to be seen, which they also found worrisome. It seemed likely he’d be with Athos if there weren’t some circumstance preventing him from doing so. Aramis also wondered where Arielda was and what she was doing.

They’d agreed that she wouldn’t allow serious harm to come to Athos. Now, Aramis was concerned that perhaps he and Porthos hadn’t made clear what constituted a pernicious wound for a human warrior.

“Damn,” Porthos muttered, drawing Aramis’ attention outward.

Athos was emerging from the tent, the older fairy following him, speaking animatedly, his hands moving to indicate something apparently urgent.

“They barely had time for a draught of water!” Porthos said, clearly disgusted by what passed for chivalry among the fairy kind. In their own tournaments, when a truce was called for the combatants to rest, time was given for them to be appropriately tended.

A few moments later, Athos’ fairy opponent came out, and though they kept their eyes on the tent, they did not see the dodgy fairy that had entered it last leave it once more.

It was too late to worry about treachery, however, because the snide-voiced herald was announcing the resumption of the contest, during which they finally learned his opponent’s name: Raven.

Aramis gave Athos a critical once-over, trying to assess his fitness for continuing the contest. He had apparently doused his head, for his hair hung in damp tendrils down his forehead and around his ears and dripped sporadically onto the fresh doublet he’d donned. His left eye was mostly useless, if Aramis was any judge—and he’d tended his fair share of eye injuries in the field. At least the slash wound to his jaw seemed to have stopped bleeding for the time being.

Small blessings, he supposed, given the quality of Athos’ opponent.

As the first blows of the second round rang out across the contest grounds, Aramis gave Porthos a nod, and they moved as one toward the alley that would lead them onto the field of battle and into full view of the mad crowd that roared and stomped just over their heads.

*****

Athos was, by nature, a peaceable man. He enjoyed wine, the laughter of his companions, and moments of forgetfulness in the training yard, when all of the sorrows of the world were simplified to just this: Breathe. Lunge. Thrust. Parry.

He would have gladly spent his life practicing the warrior’s art without ever once being called upon to use it. When in the service of his king and country, he did his duty. When at the backs of his brothers in arms and heart, he did it with love.

But Athos never enjoyed watching the light leaking slow from a dying boy’s eyes, and he hated the way hope turned to astonishment in the moments before an enemy’s death.

And he had never before cared much for his own death; let it come when it would, bringing a different and better peace.

So there were layered ironies when Athos resumed the field, for he not only wished that he could find a way to kill Raven—for kill he would, and gladly, in this instance. But Athos found that he also very much wanted to live.

It had been a long time since he’d had such a powerful motivation, Athos thought, taking in the sight of d’Artagnan, fitted in his royal tunic and those tight trousers that left little to the imagination—not that he had to imagine any longer. The light of the morning limned the tips of his ears and the smooth line of his jaw and burnished his skin to glowing. God, but he was beautiful!

And he was Athos’, body and soul. It was a wondrous and monstrous distraction.

Athos was recalled to his immediate duty by Strix’s bombastic recital of their titles, followed by his call to resume arms.

In the medical tent, Feverfew had given him a cordial that had had an invigorating effect, washing through his veins and taking with it every ache and pain and the fatigue of long battle. Even so, when Athos parried Raven’s first fearsome blow, he felt it travel from his hand to his elbow, felt it in his shoulder and into his neck. Even his ears rang with it so that he shook his head to ward off vertigo.

Raven grinned, and in it, Athos saw his own death, writ clear in the fairy’s confidence and in his swagger.

“You can have your freedom, human. Concede this contest and walk off with your life. I’ll see to your safe passage to the portal.”

“Thank you, no,” he answered, pleased that there was yet no breathlessness in his voice.

Raven circled and Athos followed his movements, lagging a half-step, trying to lead him into an attack and then catch him on the wrong foot.

The nature of Raven’s grin changed. “So you’re seduced, then, after all. Under the boy’s thrall. Quick work, that. Like father, like son.”

Athos knew the lascivious wink was meant to enrage him, and he let it go, saying, as mildly as he could, “You’ll never know.”

The fairy laughed at that, a short, sharp sound that was followed at once by a series of lightning fast strikes that forced Athos to retreat before them.

He met every thrust he could see, but Raven’s speed was astonishing, and Athos was man enough to know when he was outmatched. Recognizing that he’d never win with blade work alone, Athos stepped into the next thrust and brought his elbow up, letting Raven’s blade slice through the heavy leather of his gauntlet for the chance at breaking his nose.

The fairy pulled his head back at the last moment but made a gratifying misstep as he retreated.

After that, the banter dropped off altogether until Athos lost his sword to a deft maneuver that twisted it from his hand.

He leapt out of the way of Raven’s follow-through and found his dagger in his hand with no conscious thought.

 _Never bring a knife to a sword fight_ was a tired joke when Paris’ whores were still Roman slaves, and it seemed that some humor was truly universal, for by Raven’s expression, he was thinking something along the same lines.

“It’s not the size of the blade that counts,” Athos said, “but what you do with it in close.”

Of course, getting close was going to be no laughing matter.

Raven’s blade was a steel blur as he moved through a series of feints intended to draw Athos into a fatal misstep. Athos instead stood outside the reach of Raven’s blade and adopted the arch, bored expression he’d learned at his father’s patrician knee.

He waited, watching for his moment, and then dropped into a roll beneath the sweep of Raven’s downward swing, and slashed him behind his left knee as the fairy stepped out of his way.

He felt the buffeting thwap of the flat of Raven’s blade as it struck him across his bent back. The force of the blow threw him off-balance and he sprawled in the grass, lost his dagger, and came up on one elbow in time to see Raven deliver the killing blow.

He had seconds before the blade took his throat out, and he didn’t think, every bloody hour of battle, every sweaty minute of training in the blazing barracks’ courtyard, every admonition in Porthos’ deep, patient voice reminding him to quit being a gentleman and fight, damnit—it all resolved itself in muscle memory as he flipped the dagger in his hand, hilt out, the blade against his wrist, and rose to meet the sword that meant his death.

The guard of his dagger caught against the descending sword and bought him a second’s breath to roll into the thrust, turning the sword blade with the dagger hilt and catching it between his hilt and hip, the weight of his body pulling the sword out of Raven’s hand even as he brought his leg around to strike the back of the fairy’s knees, dropping him.

Athos’ hand got to the grip of Raven’s sword first, and then he was up, the point against his opponent’s throat, foot on the fairy’s wrist, pinning that hand—with its deadly dagger—to the ground.

Raven gave him a smile of grim admiration, “You have me.”

No cries from the crowd now, no imperious orders for blood.

Only the hushed susurrus of shock and the raucous caw of some carrion bird anticipating dinner.

“Look to your wrist, human,” the fairy said then, and when he said it, Athos felt the sting of the cut, where he’d taken a slice across his gauntlet without even feeling it at the time.

“I think I’ll live,” Athos answered, not willing to take his eyes off of his opponent, even down and disarmed as he was.

“Unlikely,” Raven answered, and then Athos felt his blood catch fire.

*****

Aramis and Porthos had watched from the safety of the alley between viewing stands, hoods up, hands on their sword hilts beneath their cloaks, and when Athos had brought Raven to earth, they’d shared a jubilant embrace, beaming ear-to-ear but silent in the face of the unrest above and around them: The crowd did not approve of this turn of events.

Their joy turned to confusion when nothing happened. Athos neither delivered the killing blow nor indicated that he was conceding the fight.

The tableau held—victor and vanquished foe—and the crowd’s restlessness grew like an approaching sea, waves building in volume, breaking the tension with action as one and then a dozen and then all of the watching fairies were on their feet, stomping and braying.

Still, Athos stood unmoving. Aramis watched as the slender sword of d’Artagnan’s body leapt into view, their friend’s graceful haste a second indication that something was amiss.

Aramis and Porthos broke cover at once, shoulder to shoulder at a dead run, without even a consulting look, true brothers in this as in everything.

When they arrived at the scene, d’Artagnan was speaking urgently with Athos, repeating his name in increasingly frantic tones until at last Athos looked up at them.

The left side of his face was curled in a rictus grin, the right unmoved, and he seemed to be trying to speak but unable.

Though it was readily apparent that he was no longer capable of killing his opponent, Raven remained where he was, prone beneath the trembling tip of the sword Athos held and which it was quite likely he was about to drop.

“Athos, what’s happened?” d’Artagnan seemed leery of approaching the combatants, and Aramis wondered if it was a rule of the game, a suspicion confirmed when the sour-faced herald hurried up.

Annoyed, the officious fairy barked, “What is the meaning of this? You, Athos, do you concede victory to Raven?”

Athos still said nothing, though he was struggling to speak, his twisted mouth opening and closing, lips moving, but no word or even sound issued forth.

“He’s poisoned!” Feverfew cried as he, too, bustled up, shouldering between d’Artagnan and Aramis to reach Athos’ side.

d’Artagnan’s hand darted out to stop him. “No!” In the syllable was anguish so intimate that Aramis, boon companion of them both, looked away.

“Let the contest be ended,” d’Artagnan said, though his voice was choked with emotion and his eyes swam with unshed tears.

From the ground, Raven croaked, “It’s done.”

“Why?” d’Artagnan asked, hands clenching and unclenching as he struggled to maintain his control.

“Do you know how much you look like your father?” Raven asked. But he went on before d’Artagnan could answer. “I loved your father more than life, more than duty or honor or loyalty, and she made me kill him.”

Had there been venom in a word, the Queen would have died on the spot. There was no question which ‘she’ the guard meant.

“She gave me no choice…but I swore that I would exact just vengeance for what she did to us, and now I have seen it through. She will not have her heir. She will not have her throne! And there will be war between the peoples until the world ends, for all it matters to me. I care for nothing.”

With an effort painful to behold, Athos had turned back to look at Raven and brought his left hand up to support the sword in his right, which was now shaking like he’d been stricken with palsy.

When Athos’ eyes were upon him, Raven raised himself from the ground, grasped the sword blade with his gauntleted hand, and drove the tip into his throat, just beside the fragile apple of it. It wasn’t a killing blow, though it welled immediately with blood that flowed in a slow but steady stream. Given the toxin on the blade, it was a close race between blood loss and poison to kill him.

Of course, it was also going to kill Athos, a point that Strix seemed to feel was beyond the scope of his duties as Recorder of Contests.

“By the rules of the contest, any suitor who employs poison is disqualified. Therefore, I declare Athos, Comte de Ferè, the ultimate victor and only claimant to the hand of Cainson, Prince of the House of Serei, our most gracious and beloved queen.”

He turned to the swaying Athos and gave a nominal bow—inclining his chin a fraction of an inch and lowering his eyes for a moment—before saying, “Sir, the day is yours.”

At his words, the restless roar of the unsettled crowd swelled to a cacophony of angry shouts and the thunder of hundreds of feet leaving the stands in favor of the contest field.

They were coming to claim their own blood, and there were only the Musketeers to stop them.

“Two hundred to three—” Porthos began, but Athos interrupted him.

“Four,” he said from d’Artagnan’s shoulder. They were back-to-back, not so much for cover as to keep Athos upright.

Porthos nodded his apology and corrected himself. “Two hundred to four? I like those odds.”

Aramis threw off his cloak, put his back to Porthos, pleased as always to have the strength of him there, and drew his sword with a smile.

“Indeed, it seems hardly fair…for them.”

And then the crowd was upon them.

*****

“Enough!”

It wasn’t merely a shout, though that was startling enough coming from the prissy Recorder of Contests, who had heretofore exhibited only a withering tongue, not one that could command legions.

This voice made the very air heavy with it, laying the words atop them like a leaden blanket, darkening the very sky overhead.

Or maybe that was just Athos, swiftly losing consciousness as his sword slipped from nerveless fingers.

“There will be no further violation of the rules of the contest.”

The voice pressed upon the crowd, and Athos felt it in his heart, which stuttered and slowed in his chest.

Two hundred pairs of feet stilled in their stomping. Four hundred eyes fixed on the sour-faced Strix, like hounds chastened for howling, awaiting their master’s return to pleasure.

“Disperse at once.”

From his knees, swaying, Athos felt the words like a shove between his shoulder blades, and he might have tried to obey, crawling like a dog, except for d’Artagnan’s arm, which half restrained, half supported him.

“He needs help!” d’Artagnan cried, and there was a flurry of movement at his words.

Athos lost time between the contest field and the medical tent, swimming up from the grey to find himself stretched on a cot, stripped to his shirt and smalls and being tended by Feverfew, who was wearing the professional mask of someone who bears witness to regrettable death as a matter of course.

Athos might have felt a shiver of fear if he could feel anything at all. As it was, his limbs were swathed in a blessed, warm numbness, and his mind, foggy with exhaustion, registered only distantly his distress.

d’Artagnan’s distress got through, however, drawing Athos’ eyes and a shudder of effort to raise himself from the pillow—an effort that failed when the fairy physician pushed him back to the pillow.

“No movement, my good man. You’ll speed the poison’s work.”

“There must be something you can do.” This from Aramis, who should have known better, having been witness himself to enough gruesome and awful fates.

“It is a swift and deadly killer, as you’ve seen.” He indicated the field beyond the tent, where the queen’s guards had gathered in the departing crowd’s wake to carry off their dying brother.

“The only reason your friend is still alive is that his wound was farther from the head and heart and he received only a glancing blow.”

“Then there’s hope?” Porthos’ voice was a deep bass rumble registering only faintly in Athos’ ears. He was so tired.

“None,” the physician answered, sorrow evident in his voice. “It will take longer to kill him, but die he will. I am sorry.”

“There is one way.”

The cold voice cut through the haze in which Athos floated and brought the room into focus once more.

“My lady,” Feverfew murmured, bowing.

He couldn’t see them from his position flat on his back in the cot, but Athos imagined Porthos’ stiff courtesy and Aramis’ elaborate and graceful one.

“How?” d’Artagnan demanded brusquely, obviously forgetting his manners in his anguish over Athos’ state.

“You share the gift of all of our bloodline,” the queen said, and it was not a question.

d’Artagnan’s, “Yes,” was subdued, a shameful confession.

“Then you can draw the poison from him in the usual way, when you take his essence into yourself.”

There was a breathing silence. Athos understood almost at once what she meant, as did d’Artagnan, apparently, for a moment later he broke the tension with a vehement, “No! I won’t do that to him.”

“Then your lover will die.”

Athos thought by her tone she intended to sound disinterested, bored even, but she did not quite succeed in fooling him. Perhaps it was the poison quieting the rest of his senses, for his ears seemed sharper, and he could detect in her tone both desperation and cunning. He tried to warn d’Artagnan, but he couldn’t make his voice work.

He must have made some sound, however, for d’Artagnan was suddenly there, kneeling beside the cot and grasping his hand.

“I am sorry, Athos,” he was saying, though Athos couldn’t quite see his face, which was blurring now, grey edging around his vision so that the room was ringed in soft light. “I cannot do this thing. You know why.”

Athos wanted to say that it was fine, that he understood. He wanted to touch d’Artagnan’s face and feel his lips one more time on his own. He wanted, in that last moment of clarity, many things he had long ago given up or put away.

But it was too late.

“It is true that he would be bound to you forever, enthralled, for any mortal that loves a fairy while in our realm is so stricken with love that he cannot be freed. But it would do him no lasting harm, as long as you and he were together in the same realm, and the queen is correct—your particular power could heal him with little harm to yourself.”

Feverfew’s voice was urgent with hope, and Athos tried to squeeze d’Artagnan’s hand to assure him that he was willing to take the risk.

But d’Artagnan must not have felt it, for he said, “He’s too far gone already; it would be perverse, a mockery of the act of love. I will not so dishonor him. It’s too late.”

“I can counteract the effects of the poison long enough to revive his…ardor.”

“What are they talking about, d’Artagnan?” Porthos asked from somewhere well beyond Athos’ narrowing vision.

“I think I know,” Aramis answered. “d’Artagnan,” he continued, “is this thing truly within your power?”

“Yes.” d’Artagnan’s answer was a mere whisper of sound in the still air, but it carried the weight of many unspoken things.

“Athos, do you wish this?” Aramis was suddenly there, peering over d’Artagnan’s shoulder, his handsome face drawn and pale with worry.

Athos strained his every sinew to nod his head.

“Then I think it is time that Porthos and I made ourselves scarce. We will see you again, my brother,” he said, reaching around d’Artagnan to squeeze Athos’ shoulder. He felt it only distantly.

Porthos bid a similar adieu, and then they were gone. The queen likewise departed, or so Athos assumed.

Feverfew appeared moments later, a stinking cup in his hand, and between d’Artagnan and the physician, they got the cup’s contents down him, though he gagged and shuddered with its foulness.

The effects were almost immediate. First, he felt d’Artagnan’s hand gripping his own tight enough to hurt. Then the ferocious burning of the poisoned wound made itself known, and he hissed between his teeth at it.

d’Artagnan’s eyes, avid and fierce, fixed on his face. “Athos?”

“I’m with you,” Athos answered, squeezing d’Artagnan’s hand and sighing when his grip loosened.

He pushed himself onto his elbows, happy to find that he could, and took a brief internal inventory: Nothing else seemed seriously awry.

“How long do we have?” he asked Feverfew, who was hovering behind d’Artagnan.

“Perhaps an hour,” the physician answered, and then he thrust another cup at Athos. “Drink this. It will ease your pain and give you energy for the battle to come.”

There was a twinkle in his eye, a slyness that made Athos laugh, and he took the much more pleasant-smelling draught gratefully, throwing it down in one long swallow. It struck his blood like a thunderbolt, lighting him from within, and the last of his lassitude fell away.

He was not healed—he could still feel the poison coursing sluggishly through him, but it was as a muffled discomfort rather than the searing pain that had first set him on fire when he’d been cut.

d’Artagnan’s eyes had not left Athos’ face, and his relief was visible as Athos regained strength.

“I’m alright,” Athos said, sitting up altogether. “But I won’t be for much longer if we don’t get on with things.” Already the poison was trying to overcome the ease that the second potion had wrought.

Feverfew cleared his throat meaningfully, gathered his things in haste, and departed, pausing at the tent flap to wink wickedly at Athos, who smiled back and waved him away.

“Do you truly want this thing?” d’Aragnan asked as soon as they were alone.

“What, you?” Athos answered. He made a show of looking d’Artagnan up and down, letting his eyes linger deliberately on d’Artagnan’s lap. “I could suffer it.”

“This is no laughing matter,” d’Artagnan said, though the choked laugh in his voice rather belied his words.

“No, indeed. It’s a matter of life and death.” His words were sobering, but as he was in the process of removing his shirt and smalls, shimmying out of them from his back on the bed, it had a less than serious effect.

d’Artagnan made a disarmingly attractive sound at the sight of Athos stretched out naked on the cot and stood up to make quick work of his own clothes.

“This is not how I imagined our first time together,” he said ruefully, standing naked and somewhat awkwardly beside the cot.

“You wanted me to be on top?” Athos murmured silkily, shifting so that his knees fell open.

Still, d’Artagnan did not take the bait.

“If we do this, I could kill you.”

“There are worse ways to die,” Athos said.

“This isn’t funny!” There was anguish in his voice and on his face, and Athos reached out to grasp his hand, tugging him until he knelt with one knee on the bed.

“I’m not laughing,” he said then, a little breathless, letting d’Artagnan see just how much he was affected by the sight of him so near, so naked, not just unclothed but revealed in all of his beauty and fear. He had never looked more human.

With a sound that owed as much to distress as to desire, d’Artagnan at last relented, bringing both knees onto the bed and straddling Athos, whose arousal grew as he felt the weight and heat of him where he rested against Athos’ raised knees.

“I would have done this differently,” Athos noted, stroking his hand down d’Artagnan’s breast and feeling a growing satisfaction at the way d’Artagnan’s breath caught and at the hunger growing in his eyes. “I’d have laid you down and licked you from ankle to the apple of your throat. I’d take you into my mouth until I choked on the meat of you and felt you spill. I’d make you writhe on my fingers until you were loose and begging. I’d—.”

His next intention was swallowed by d’Artagnan’s devouring mouth.

The kiss was annihilating, driving both breath and thought from him until there was only the heat and slick rightness of his tongue and the feel of his cock hardening against Athos’ belly and then a flash of teeth against this throat and a rough tongue turning his nipples to twin, singing points of fire.

There was a heavy hand on his chest, sliding downward with torturous deliberation, until he was panting and begging, sounds trapped in his throat by the fingers in his mouth, which he suckled until they were withdrawn and the weight, likewise, abated.

He looked down the length of himself to see d’Artagnan reaching behind him, and there was no doubt what he was about. His face was a mask of abstracted concentration, and Athos yearned to be the one to make his mouth drop open and his head go back, to rip a groan out of his throat as he rode himself open.

Instead, Athos had to content himself with wrapping his hand around d’Artagnan’s slender length, feeling the silk of his skin over the iron of him and himself groaning as d’Artagnan’s hips jerked, and he bit off a curse at the steady rhythm Athos took up.

His balls were beginning to ache with need when d’Artagnan at last put one hand on the bed beside Athos’ head and wrapped the other around Athos’ cock.

“God,” Athos breathed, and then, “Please,” and then d’Artagnan was taking him in, first the head of his cock and then the rest of him, the heat and tightness of the passage forcing broken moans out of him, a babble of nonsense syllables and blasphemy, until at last d’Artagnan’s ass was against Athos’ thighs, and he could feel his lover’s tension in every singing muscle.

Whatever control d’Artagnan had been exerting abandoned him then as he raised himself a little, Athos feeling the drag of his cock inside d’Artagnan, and then dropped once more, striking something that had him crying out—Athos’ name and professions of love and a litany of curses broken over sobbing breaths as he impaled himself again and again on Athos’ straining cock.

His part momentarily forgotten, d’Artagnan gripped but loosely in his hand, Athos could only ride the wave of exquisite pleasure that carried him. Sweat stung his eyes and the breath left his throat in tearing gasps, and even so he felt only the point where d’Artagnan and he joined, only the squeeze and release of d’Artagnan’s punishing rhythm, only the thunder of blood in his veins and the sense that he was being stripped of everything that made him Athos—nobleman, Musketeer, brother, lover.

Suddenly afraid, Athos cried, “d’Artagnan!” and gripped him by the hips to still him in his frenzy. “Wait!”

Rather ask the sun to stop burning.

Still d’Artagnan rode him, his head thrown back now, eyes squeezed shut, chest heaving with the effort. Sweat slicked his burnished skin, and there was a high flush in his cheeks that made him look like he was on fire from within. Where his hands braced themselves on Athos’ chest, he burned, and the sensation punched the breath from him.

Athos groaned with his terrible need, wanting nothing more than to let himself go, to release himself inside d’Artagnan and be lost.

d’Artagnan resisted the restriction of Athos’ hands, pulled away, seated himself once more, settling with Athos so deep inside him that Athos could feel the frantic trammeling of d’Artagnan’s heart, and then he cried out, splashing Athos’ belly and chest with hot seed.

With that sharp and wild scent filling his nostrils, Athos could no longer resist, surrendering to his need and letting go, knowing as he did so that though he might live, he would never again be free. With a wild shout he abandoned himself to annihilation.

Athos floated for a while in a soft grey haze, coming back to himself only when he heard his name, whispered hoarsely from a few inches away.

d’Artagnan was still above him, still seated with Athos’ softening cock inside, still sweaty and flushed and gloriously naked.

But he was also terrified, as was apparent by his expression, some awful combination of scything remorse and horrified hope.

“Athos?” he said again, and it was hardly recognizable as his voice, so broken was it and so tortured.

“I’m with you,” he said, echoing his earlier words.

Some of the fear in d’Artagnan’s face cleared, to be replaced by mothering worry. He hastened to pull away from Athos, which Athos prevented with a hand on his nape, pulling him down for a wet and filthy kiss that left them panting and grinning when it ended.

d'Artagnan’s laugh was like the breaking of a curse and Athos’ breathless, “I love you,” the renewal of a vow already made.

They were moving into a second consummation of their love when there was a loud and sustained throat-clearing from the vicinity of the tent flap.

Aramis’ voice, rich with amusement, carried through to them. “Your presence is required by the queen as soon as you are ready, gentlemen.”

The mention of the queen was enough to bank their ardor for the time being, and they rose and dressed, interrupting their motions for a light touch here, a deeper kiss there, until they were, at long last, as decent as they were going to be.

There was an awkward silence as they became aware of the rough clamor of the distant crowd and, closer, the low murmurs of Aramis and Porthos, who must be standing just beyond the flap, keeping watch.

“What now?” Athos asked, voice a little hoarse from their lovemaking.

“I think you’ve just become my husband,” d’Artagnan answered.

“I know that,” Athos said, as if it had always been a given that they would someday be inexorably bound. “I meant, what will we do now about your kingdom?”

d’Artagnan’s eyes widened, and Athos had a moment to recognize with relief that d’Artagnan could still exhibit surprise; his recent experiences had not yet made him jaded beyond wonder.

“You’d stay here in the Faire and rule with me?”

Athos shrugged. “It’s a living.”

“But I don’t want to stay here!”

It was with even more relief that Athos witnessed this reaction. Neither did he want to remain in the fairy realm, but…

“We may have no choice. If you leave, there will be war here for certain. Neither of us can countenance being the cause of that.”

It was a heavy truth, and as he watched d’Artagnan’s shoulders slump with the weight of it, he felt the pinch of regret for having had to say it.

As always, though, his brave young Gascon took his feelings in hand and bested them, squaring his shoulders, raising his chin, and offering Athos his arm.

“Shall we go out to greet our people, husband?”

“Let’s,” Athos answered, grateful for the strength of d’Artagnan’s arm as they emerged from the tent into the yellow light of noon and were greeted by an oppressive and ominous silence.

*****

Despite being strangers who had no right to be there, none questioned the Musketeers’ presence at the flap of the medical tent. They’d stationed themselves there at once, expecting a challenge, though they weren’t sure from whom it would come.

But Aramis and Porthos had had no trouble keeping people from disturbing their friends. The physician hadn’t been a problem; he’d given them a lascivious grin and wandered off, muttering to himself. Neither had the herald, whom they’d learned was called Strix, been difficult to get rid of: At the first sounds of pleasure emerging from the tent, his back had stiffened even further, until Aramis thought his spine must snap, and taken himself off.

Queen Serei had strode away across the field without even acknowledging them, her personal guard hastening to match her steps, and could now be seen on her viewing stand, where she was engaged in apparently furious conversation with Ananias.

As the sounds behind them grew louder and more passionate, Aramis found himself uncomfortably aroused, and his usual trick—picturing the king naked—did nothing to dampen his ardor. He stole a sidelong glance at his lover and was gratified to see that Porthos was having the same issue.

Hardly green probationers, however, they stuck to their post, despite the tightness in their trousers that threatened to grow to an intolerable ache. When images came to him unbidden of his two friends in close congress, he tried to squelch them, but he would be the worst sort of liar if he pretended he wasn’t curious.

And interested.

At last a contingent of guards could be seen breaking away from the queen’s stand and coming across the field towards them. Anticipating their errand, Aramis cleared his throat, loudly and repeatedly, and then brought his boots together in a clap of leather as the guards reached the tent.

Aramis was about to reach for his sword when he sensed movement at his back, and he turned to see d’Artagnan emerging with Athos, apparently hale, if not hearty, at his side.

Aramis, who had had precious little time with his friends to get used to d’Artagnan’s new features, noted that the young man looked thoroughly swived. It was a good look on him, but he refrained from saying so, given that d’Artagnan was about to become king of this realm, and it might be somewhat beneath his dignity to have such a thing pointed out in public.

Later, when they were alone, would be enough time to tease the poor lad.

For his part, Athos bore himself with a gracious self-confidence, as though he were doing the world a favor by living. The handful of times Aramis had seen him put the guise on, he’d been impressed with how thoroughly insufferable his good friend could appear.

Athos somewhat ruined the effect of his inapproachability, however, by throwing him a broad wink and accepting, with a wolfish grin of self-satisfaction, Porthos’ manly slap on the back.

Without a word, Aramis fell in beside d’Artagnan, Porthos taking up Athos’ flank on the other side, and like that they strode across the contest field toward the unsettled crowd and the cold voice of the queen and the snake-eyed Ananias.

If the fairy guard was disconcerted by being ignored, they did not show it.

Just before they arrived within earshot of the viewing stand, Queen Serei threw up her hand in clear dismissal, and Ananias, face twisted into an ugly grimace, retreated with ill grace to his own seat, one level below the queen’s. The queen took her throne as though it would be hers forever and not only for a few minutes or hours more.

With an imperious gesture, she indicated that the Musketeers should advance. Their guard took positions at the foot of the viewing stand, whether there to protect or imprison her human guests, Aramis did not know. On the dais where she sat were three goblin servants, perched uncomfortably on stools and as forgotten as the furniture.

“A fine match,” Queen Serei said at last, though there was nothing of real praise in her voice. It was not readily apparent whether she meant Athos’ defeat of his opponents on the field of battle or the joining of d’Artagnan and Athos.

d’Artagnan said nothing, keeping his eyes on her. Athos inclined his head, and Aramis saw a flash of frustration cross her face, there and then gone so quickly that he might have thought he was imagining it if he hadn’t had so much practice reading royal faces.

 _She doesn’t like her champion_ , Aramis thought. He shifted his weight subtly and dropped his hands to his sides, better to reach his sword.

“That won’t be necessary, human,” the queen said then, casually, as though making an observation on the weather. Aramis felt it in his guts, however, a squirming and a coldness there, as if he’d swallowed live snakes. He clenched his hands into fists and took in a sharp breath, trying not to scream.

“That’s enough,” d’Artagnan said, and though his voice didn’t have anything of the supernatural in it, his natural command was enough, apparently, to lessen and then banish the sensations altogether.

“Parlor tricks, Aunt?” d’Artagnan said, and this time the queen did nothing to hide her irritation and dislike.

“Mind your tongue, sweet nephew, or I’ll cleave it to the roof of your mouth.”

“Tut-tut,” Athos said, taking a step forward, effectively claiming the right to protect d’Artagnan. “Is that any way to speak to your heir, savior of the Faire and new ruler of the Three Realms?”

Athos was baiting her, and though Aramis couldn’t know why, he had faith that his brother had a plan. Athos had ever been a master strategist.

She ignored him utterly, directing her venom at d’Artagnan instead. “You’re not king yet,” she hissed, and in her voice were a thousand lovers keening for their dead, all of whom wore d’Artagnan’s face.

Aramis felt it like a blow, felt the tears start, unbidden, down his face, and looked over to see Porthos shaking with grief.

“Nor shall he be,” Ananias said.

He stood on the step just below the dais, and he bristled with affronted dignity.

“The people of the Faire will never accept a half-breed bastard as their king. Too many of us are tired of sharing the Three Realms with lesser races. We’ll hardly obey this creature, who isn’t even wholly fae. His blood is impure, and his rule shall doom us all.”

As Aramis had already felt Ananias’ power, he knew that the fairy was exercising none of it now. Nevertheless, he felt his blood freeze at the cold loathing in his voice.

“It was you,” Queen Serei said then, in a voice that matched Ananias’ for pure odium. “You arranged for my guard to cheat in the contest and poison Athos.”

Ananias’ smile was like the slither of a snake in the near darkness.

“Your rule is over, sister,” he said, emphasizing their kinship with obvious distaste. “The next fairy to sit on the throne will do so because he has destroyed all opposition. No more will we kowtow to the lesser scum.”

He indicated the goblin servants, who had stood up moments before, apparently uneasy with the increasing tension on the dais.

“Who will serve your meals for you without them, though?”

Aramis experienced a moment of strange disconnect as the light, wry voice joined the affray.

“Where are my guards?” Queen Serei demanded, a good question, Aramis thought, given Arielda’s apparently uncontested intrusion.

“You’ll find, I think, that they are indisposed right now, m’lady,” Arielda said, giving a mock curtsey as she stepped past Ananias and onto the dais itself. “I do apologize. It seems they’ve all been struck with a loosening of the bowels.”

Her smirk was completely unrepentant, making it clear that she was, in some way, responsible for the condition of the guards.

“All of them?” Aramis murmured, impressed despite himself and enormously amused, too.

“Oh, yes,” Arielda answered. She leaned forward as though sharing gossip: “I heard it was something in the mess hall food.”

Porthos chuckled, earning a piercing glare from the queen, who was not remotely amused by her information or her delivery thereof.

“As for you,” Arielda said then, turning to face Ananias, “I think you’ll find this next bit quite to your tastes.”

At a nod from Arielda, the queen’s three goblin servants drew vicious-looking, obviously homemade daggers from beneath their tunics and surrounded the sneering fairy.

“You think such child’s toys can harm me?” he said, his face the very picture of disdain.

“No, but I’m quite sure the poison on their blades will. You were kind enough to have Raven test it for us. Thanks for that, by the way. The goblin alchemist you bought it from wasn’t quite sure about lethal doses.”

Aramis reflected that, given Ananias’ vocal gift, it must be rare indeed for him to be struck speechless. He felt honored to be witnessing it.

“Who _are_ you?” d’Artagnan asked.

“Where are my manners?” Aramis asked unctuously, pouring on the faux charm. “Athos and d’Artagnan, my fellow Musketeers—and glowing newlyweds, I might add—allow me to introduce to you Arielda, daughter of Queen Maven of the Goblin Realm and of Kayin, brother of this fair lady the queen, if I am not mistaken.”

Only at the youngest Musketeer’s stunned look did Aramis recall the most pertinent of all titles, “She’s your half-sister, d’Artagnan.”

“And, by birth and blood, the rightful ruler of the Three Realms under the Treaty,” Arielda added. She gave d’Artagnan a mock-rueful look. “Sorry, brother.”

“That’s quite alright,” Athos said, stepping in for the floundering d’Artagnan. “It happens that we have a pressing engagement in the mortal realm, and I require my husband attend me.” Athos suited action to words and took d’Artagnan’s arm, tugging him off the dais and toward the stairs.

Beside him, Porthos chortled, and Aramis gave him a nudge to the ribs to remind him of their perilous position.

He needn’t have worried, however, for Porthos stepped a pace forward, toward Queen Serei, and gave her a most courtly bow. He followed this with an identical obeisance to Arielda and then, giving a wide berth to the goblin servants frozen in their lethal tableau with Ananias, who was now pale with fury, Porthos stepped down from the dais and followed their brother Musketeers.

With a shrug and a courtesy to both fair ladies, Aramis took the better part of valor as well and followed the rest down to the field, where they found the queen’s guards—indeed, every guard of any stripe, it seemed—writhing about the ground, clutching their guts, or ducking beneath the viewing stands to find some modicum of privacy.

They stopped upwind of the spectacle to regroup.

“What now?” he asked Athos, deferring to the usual order of things despite d’Artagnan’s nominal position as prince.

“We must bid farewell to a friend, and then we should be on our way to the portal, assuming we can find it.”

“I can help with that,” a voice said from behind them.

They turned to find a goblin of middle height and middle age, wearing the nondescript garb of a court servant. If it weren’t for the nasty blade stuck beneath his belt and the victory grin lurking at the corners of his mouths, they might have mistaken him for any ordinary castle creature.

“Queen Arielda asks that you accept my service as a guide to bring you to the portal that will return you to your own realm. We will meet an escort at the edge of the woods beyond Ebenhome in an hour.”

“We are grateful for your assistance, Sir…”

“Ghest is my name.” He sketched a bow, which they all copied.

“Sir Ghest, we have a farewell we must relay before we take our leave of this place,” Athos said smoothly, guiding d’Artagnan in the direction of the medical tent. “And then we are entirely at your disposal.”

Aramis and Porthos fell in behind their friends and left the royals to their wrangling.

*****

The medical tent was besieged with groaning guards, and Feverfew had lost some of his jollity in the crush. Still, he seemed happy enough to make time for them, stepping outside gratefully to wipe his forehead on his sleeve.

“So, you have been given leave to depart the realm,” he said without preamble. Athos didn’t bother to ask how the good doctor knew.

“Yes,” d’Artagnan answered, seeming to emerge, finally, from his momentary shock at discovering that he had a half-sister and was no longer required to rule the Three Realms.

“You are both going?” Feverfew asked. Something in his phrasing set gave him pause.

“Yes,” Athos said, worry stirring in his gut. “Is there a problem?”

Feverfew shrugged. “Yes and no. As long as you’re together in the mortal realm, you needn’t worry about the fairy lover’s geas. It hasn’t the same power in your realm as it does here. However…”

Feverfew paused and looked significantly at d’Artagnan.

Athos followed his gaze and realized the problem at once.

“Your ears,” Athos muttered, feeling his heart sink. Were they never to be free of this accursed place?

d’Artagnan clapped his hands over them as though by hiding them, they’d go unseen. It was both endearing and a little sad.

“I can give you a glamour something like your father must have used when you were a babe,” Feverfew began, but Athos refused to hope, knowing that there was a condition.

“But,” Feverfew continued, confirming Athos’ concern, “you must return periodically to the Faire to renew it. I am not the magician your father’s court physician was, and I cannot guarantee the longevity of such a spell in the mortal realm.”

“How often?” d’Artagnan asked, his voice tight.

“Once every seven years, as is usual in these sorts of situations,” Feverfew answered breezily, as if they were talking about going from Paris to London instead of traveling to other worlds.

“Well,” Athos said, recovering before his husband, “at least you’ll get to see your sister.”

“Of course there’s that…”

d’Artagnan’s subdued response was not quite comforting, and Athos knew as well as he that Arielda’s throne was founded on shifting and dangerous ground. Seven years from now, who knew what might be happening in the Faire?

Still, they would have to take what they could get and make of it what they would. It was, after all, the Musketeer way.

“I’m afraid we’re short on time,” Athos prompted, and Feverfew started with an, “Of course, of course, I’ll just be a moment,” before bustling back into the tent.

It was rather more than a moment before he came out bearing a small green glass vial, stopper affixed with still-warm wax.

“Take this as soon as you reach the mortal realm but not before,” he said to d’Artagnan, handing him the bottle. “Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“What’s with the ‘sir’ all of a sudden?” the physician asked, bowing before d’Artagnan. “You are my sovereign prince and, too, I hope, my friend. We will see each other again, will we not, young prince?”

d’Artagnan’s smile was warm and genuine. “We shall,” he answered, and it was a promise.

“Thank you,” Athos said, bowing before the physician. “For everything.”

“Bah! Go on, now, get along. That fearsome goblin is affrighting my patients,” Feverfew observed, already turning back to his work.

Athos saw that Sir Ghest was waiting for them at the western edge of the tent.

“Have you any to take your leave of?” he asked Aramis and Porthos, whose presence with them was still a great mystery, made even more baffling by their apparent relationship with the new queen.

“I think she’s already given us all the goodbye we’re going to get,” Aramis answered, nodding at Sir Ghest by way of meaning.

“Well, then, let us be off.”

They fell in behind their goblin guide and were almost to the road that bordered the contest field on the village side when they heard a voice calling d’Artagnan’s name.

They turned as one, shoulder to shoulder, hands on the hilts of their swords, and saw that it was the physician, who had stopped as soon as he’d seen that he’d gotten their attention.

Hands cupped around his mouth, he called, “If there’s any trouble with a child, send word through the portal, and I’ll see that you get help.”

“Child?” Athos said, turning to look at d’Artagnan, who grew pale as a flower petal and then blushed red as new flame.

“Child?” Porthos and Aramis echoed in tandem.

**Fin.**


End file.
